How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

They must give themselves completely to the experience! One thinks sometimes how much more alive such people would be if they suffered! If they can’t be happy, let them at least be unhappy—really, really unhappy for once, and then they might become truly human.

They must reinforce and build on what is in their life already rather than always starting anew, hoping to find a situation without danger.

Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn’t take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human.

I knew that from then on I would have to make decisions without any footprints in the sand to follow, without any hand guiding my path. There would be no telling what would lead to what. I would have to use my judgment—not just my intuition. I would have to weigh things, take responsibility. I would have to look out at reality, not only within myse

Such people will suddenly tell you they have another plan, and they always do it the moment things start getting difficult. But it’s their everlasting switching that’s the dangerous thing, not what they choose.

In their quest for a life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful. And yet they started off believing themselves too special for this world!

Sholem was saying that freedom, for him, is having the technical facility to be able to execute whatever he wants, just whatever image he has in his mind. But that’s not freedom! That’s control, or power. Whereas I think Margaux understands freedom to be the freedom to take risks, the freedom to do something bad or to appear foolish. To not recogni

I was living in a crummy basement apartment, having just left my marriage and the suffocating feeling of leading a life that was not my own. I couldn’t understand how it had come to that.

“The only thing I ever understood is that everyone should make the big mistakes.” So I took what he said to heart and got married. Three years later I was divorced. chapter