The Idiot

“That’s a weak definition of narrative. That’s saying that narrative is just memory plus causality. But, for us, the narrative has aesthetics, too.”

“But I don’t think that’s because of our personalities,” I said. “Isn’t it more about how much money our parents have? You and I can afford to pursue some narrative just because it’s interesting. You co

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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 t

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On the plane, a flight attendant came around with newspapers. All the adults were reading them. I took one, too. From the International Herald Tribune, I learned that a ninety-five-hundred-pound elephant called Kika had been artificially inseminated in Berlin. The sperm had been taken from two male elephants and there was no way of knowing for cert

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From Oleg Cassini’s memoirs, which were under the bed, I learned that Cassini had also suffered from insomnia. One night, he woke from uneasy dreams with the opening of Dante’s Inferno setting off “a clangorous tumult in [his] subconscious: ‘Midway the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark forest.’” When I read these terrible words, chills

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Seuss shirt, got in bed, and started writing in my notebook. 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 pas

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According to Nabokov, when ancient people first invented arithmetic, it was an artificial system designed to impose order on the world. Over the course of centuries, as the system grew more and more intricate, “mathematics transcended their initial condition and became as it were a natural part of the world to which they had been merely applied. . 

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At two a.m., I started cleaning up my room, even though it wasn’t that messy. From Oleg Cassini’s memoirs, which were under the bed, I learned that Cassini had also suffered from insomnia. One night, he woke from uneasy dreams with the opening of Dante’s Inferno setting off “a clangorous tumult in [his] subconscious: ‘Midway the journey of our life

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In a black room with orange lights and pounding Spanish music we stood in a big circle dancing. It reminded me of preschool, when you also had to stand in a circle and clap your hands. I began to intuit dimly why people drank when they went dancing, and it occurred to me that maybe the reason preschool had felt the way it had was that one had had t

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I knelt to pet it between the slats of the fence. Its eyes shone with emotion—with desire and what looked like love. Rózsa let me put the rice in its dish. The dog gobbled it up. I stroked its little brow. When we went back to the house, the dog yelped piteously behind us. Looking back, I saw its head bobbing urgently over the fence.

“It would not b

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