He felt at times as if his life were something he was only waiting to use up, so that, at the end of each day, he would settle into bed with a sigh, knowing he had worked through a small bit more of his existence and had moved another centimeter toward its natural conclusion.
. . .
[H]is leisure was so well-known that it had become its own kind of prison, a schedule in the absence of one.
. . .
He looked for signs of himself, and for others of his world, and when he found them, or something close enough, he had simply stopped looking, had simply ceased to see.
. . .
“People adore nothing more than to speak of themselves,” Grandfather had said. “And if you ever find yourself in a circumstance in which you fear your place or standing—though you should not: You are a Bingham, remember, and the best child I know—then all you must do is ask the other person something about him- or herself, and they will forever after be convinced that you are the most fascinating individual they have ever encountered.”
. . .
It was as if he had been bewitched and, knowing it, had sought not to fight against it but to surrender, to leave behind the world he thought he knew for another, and all because he wanted to attempt to be not the person he was—but the one he dreamed of being.
. . .
What was life worth if he might not have his chance, slim as it might be, of feeling that it was truly his, his to make or destroy, his to mold like clay or shatter like china?
. . .
Is it not possible that, for as well as you know me, you have known only one aspect of me, that you have been blinded to who I might be, because of your familiarity with me? Is it not possible that, in your protectiveness, you have discounted me, that you have lost any ability to see me in any other way?
. . .
He could make his lack of knowledge—about flowers, baseball, football, modernist architecture, contemporary literature and art, South American food—sound like a boast; he didn’t know because there was no reason to know. You might know, but then you had wasted your time—he had other, more important things to learn about and remember.
. . .
“Self-pity is an unattractive quality in a man,” he heard his grandmother say. What about in a woman? “Also unattractive, but understandable,” his grandmother would say. “A woman has much more to pity herself for.”
. . .
This was something he had quickly grown to hate about this place: how New Yorkers congratulated themselves for ignoring the famous, while watching with unabashed avidity the minor dramas of the plain and average as they played themselves out on the street.
. . .
[H]e had attempted not to reckon with his own anger but to hide from it. But hiding hadn’t stopped things from happening. The only thing it prevented was eventually being found.
. . .
“You should always have a close friend you’re slightly afraid of.” Why? “Because it means that you’ll have someone in your life who really challenges you, who forces you to become better in some way, in whatever way you’re most scared of: Their approval is what’ll hold you accountable.”
. . .
The knowledge and recognition of who they were in life had been hard-won, but they wouldn’t be able to control who they became in death.
. . .
“Only people who have a plausible hope of being immortalized in history are so obsessed about how they might get immortalized,” she said. “The rest of us are too busy trying to get through the day.”
. . .
What he wouldn’t know until he was much older was that no one was ever free, that to know someone and to love them was to assume the task of remembering them, even if that person was still living. No one could escape that duty, and as you aged, you grew to crave that responsibility even as you sometimes resented it, that knowledge that your life was inextricable from another’s, that a person marked their existence in part by their association with you.
. . .
He had come to realize that it was when you were dying that people most wanted things from you—they wanted you to remember, they wanted reassurance, they wanted forgiveness. They wanted acknowledgment and redemption; they wanted you to make them feel better—about the fact that you were leaving while they remained; about the fact that they hated you for leaving them and dreaded it, too; about the fact that your death was reminding them of their own inevitable one; about the fact that they were so uncomfortable that they didn’t know what to say. Dying meant repeating the same things again and again, much as Peter was doing now: Yes, I remember. No, I’ll be fine. No, you’ll be fine. Yes, of course I forgive you. No, you shouldn’t feel guilty. No, I’m not in any pain. No, I know what you’re trying to say. Yes, I love you, too, I love you, too, I love you, too.
. . .
[W]e’ve been taught that it must, that experience, that learning, is a pathway to salvation; that it’s the point of life. But it isn’t. The ignorant person dies the same way as the educated one. It makes no difference in the end.
. . .
“I’m scared because I know my last thoughts are going to be about how much time I wasted—how much life I wasted. I’m scared because I’m going to die not being proud of how I lived.”
. . .
[E]ach of them wanted the other to exist only as he was currently experiencing him—as if they were both too unimaginative to contemplate each other in a different context.
. . .
In those years, fear—of sounding dumb, of being inadequate—kept him from the generosity he should have shown, and it was not until he had accumulated many regrets that he had learned that his comfort could have taken any form, that what had been important was that it was offered at all.
. . .
The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again.
. . .
[S]he was dancing because she loved to dance, and although she dipped her head graciously at the crowd’s applause, it was also clear that her joy was separate from their approval.
. . .
You were a child, and the problem isn’t that children don’t possess the full range of emotions that adults do—it is only that they don’t possess the vocabulary to express them.
. . .
[W]hen you’re older, you do anything you can to try to stay alive. Sometimes you’re not even aware you’re doing it. Something, some instinct, some worse self, takes over—you lose who you are. Not everyone does. But many of us do.
. . .
[W]hat were those feelings? Were they all the same? Were they all love? Was I able to feel it after all? Was what I had always assumed was impossible for me something I had known all along?
. . .
But really, isn’t the point as much to simply be there, to be consistent? I’m not sure if good behavior is as much a virtue as constancy.
. . .
When I was an undergraduate, a professor of mine had said there were two types of people: those who wept for the world, and those who wept for themselves. Weeping for your family, he said, was a form of weeping for yourself. “Those who congratulate themselves on their sacrifices for their families aren’t actually sacrificing at all,” he said, “because their family is an extension of their selves, and therefore a manifestation of the ego.” True selflessness, he said, meant giving of yourself to a stranger, someone whose life would never be entangled with your own.
. . .
Survival allows for hope—it is, indeed, predicated on hope—but it does not allow for pleasure, and as a topic, it is dull.
. . .
Some of us will die, but others of us will keep doing what we always have, continuing on our own oblivious way, doing what our nature compels us to, silent and unknowable and unstoppable in our rhythms.
