Exceptional minds tend to lead exceptional lives

Once upon a time, a man sat on a park bench to eat his sandwich. The man was thinking about divorcing his wife—that's the subtext here (except now I suppose it's text). He'd installed a dating app on his phone and set it to stealth mode, so his wife and her friends couldn't see, and for the last few days he’d been favoriting women, trying to see if it was true that his sexual market value had increased substantially since the last time he'd been single.

The man hunched over, angling his body so nobody could see the phone. He swiped and swiped. The last time he'd done this, twelve years ago, it'd been a negative experience—very few matches, very little interest. The man was from a minority race that the majority race in his city considered quite unattractive. Trying to date had beaten him down, and he'd just been happy someone had wanted him.

The man had his reasons for divorcing, but fundamentally, he was bored. He just wanted something different. He kept being told about all these men who used up their wives' youth and then left them. The men lived these swinging, glorious glamorous second lives, just seeing their kids every other weekend, dating younger women, going on adventures, et cetera. That seemed good to the man. Terrible for women, obviously, but…so what? That’s why if you did it, you just had to dress it up with a lot of rhetoric about how you really weren’t happy in your specific marriage, etc. There was a whole routine for this kind of thing, where you pretended you weren't engaging in the bad practice, but actually you were reifying it.

While sitting on the park bench, he had a number of reflections on the nature of masculinity and of his place in the world. He could feel himself slowly inching towards the kind of worldview (monogamy is outdated, marriage is a trap for men, men are emasculated in contemporary society, etc) that would allow him to abandon his family.

You know the really annoying thing was that his wife was a very incisive woman whom he quite enjoyed talking to, when they weren't fighting about housework and shit like that. She'd probably be very interested in his thoughts about what it was like to constantly hear (perhaps accurately!) that you were a much more valuable commodity than your own wife. She was one of the most interesting and thoughtful people he knew—that’s exactly why he’d married her! But obviously now they couldn’t talk openly, because if they did she might wonder, “Is he about to leave me?” and that subtext would lead them to fight.

Shit. Some red sauce had dripped from his sandwich onto his slacks. See, his wife would've told him not to order a meatball sub. He would've ordered it, and she'd have said, "Are you really gonna do that?" And he'd have said, "Let me order what I want! Why’re you always trying to control my order!" And then he'd have been like, "Hmm, I do have that meeting later," and he'd probably have changed his order, and then later been like...wow you were definitely right about the meatball sub, I do not know what I was thinking.

But she wasn't here, and now he had marinara on his slacks.

It wasn't the end of the world though was it? His wife never seemed to understand that he could live with marinara on his slacks—this stain really would not ruin his day in the slightest. He pretended to her, because he loved her, that he was glad she’d saved him from the chance of having a stain on his pants, but….really he didn’t care. She probably understood that though! That’s exactly why she appreciated the gesture of him saying, “Oh you were right about that order.”

Anyway, he just wanted to rebel, he supposed—do something he wasn't supposed to do. As a teenager and twentysomething he'd felt so utterly worthless that rebellion almost didn't seem to matter. Like, why rebel, when basically the world wanted him to not exist anymore? The real rebellion had been actually getting married, getting a job, doing the things he was supposed to do, but which people like him (lonely, overweight, nerdy, etc) often didn't actually manage.

He fully understood why kids shot up concerts and clubs and schools—of course he did. He supposed every man did. Even if you didn't get it when you were young (because you were handsome and successful) then by the time you're forty or fifty, you definitely get it. You want to be known! You're done being ignored! Women also claimed to be enraged and invisible, but somehow they never got around to shooting up a school so how angry could they really be?

At the same time murdering people seemed a bit much. Like...those people had lives of their own! They really were not asking to be murdered today. The explosiveness of just murdering some people or whatever—it was insane. So hopeless. People murdered because they were afraid to, you know, actually just live the way they wanted to. Like, if you're gonna do a crime, why murder? Why not rob a bank or cheat on your wife or something?

And look, his phone had beeped. Wow, guess what? Society hadn't lied—one of them had favorited him too.

But certainly there must be more to life than this relentless satisfying of drives and of momentary impulses. He supposed he was in the part of life where you finally got some responsibility. If he was a Spartan, he'd have finally left the barracks and would be part of the governing councils of his polis. (Or he’d be a helot, but the nice thing about daydreams was of course you were always a Spartan and never a helot. Like people always said guhh probably back then you’d have been a helot. No shit! This was a fantasy, for chrissakes.)

Anyway, he wasn't going to sort it out in this lunch. This lunch was over now. He had to return to work. He did delete the dating app first though. He was pretty satisfied that, actually, the conventional wisdom was correct—he did have some sexual value now, at 41, that he hadn't possessed at 29.  Which was a rather incredible thing to consider!  Obviously his hour of browsing had in no way really proven that he was now a desirable man. But it didn't need to—because he believed it. One hundred percent. He never would've gotten a reciprocal 'like' from a skinny white girl twelve years ago—twelve years ago, all his ‘likes’ were from fresh-off-the-boat immigrants from his own race, who wanted a classic American dating experience but also wanted someone their parents wouldn’t object to. Now look at him! Wow, this woman was made-up and conventionally feminine! Maybe she was a prostitute, but he'd gotten a few of those twelve years ago, and there was a definite look—a definite feel. They usually messaged you immediately in some absurdly obvious code. No, she was real.

But so what? Did he actually want to see her in real life? No.

Now his meeting was starting however, so he carried his thoughts into the meeting, and into the rest of his life, where they formed the substrate of...well, everything he did. He constantly had thoughts, all the time, about all kinds of things. They weren't necessarily that special, but they were his. Some he told to other people. Some he didn't. Many would've horrified his wife or his friends, which seemed honestly a bit weird to him (why get offended by a thought?), but maybe when you articulate a thought, it's no longer just a thought—it becomes a position, something you think it's worthwhile to tell other people. In the act of speaking it, the thought becomes an action, in other words. Which seems kind of funny—because then actual thoughts can never really be communicated!

But what wasn't true of course. To communicate thoughts, you'd simply need an audience who understood that thoughts weren't willful—that they arose spontaneously. Which most people did seem to understand! Or claim to! But there were still thoughts you shouldn't say. His thoughts weren't really that bad, in his opinion. But it's not like he wanted to go around teaching people to just say all their thoughts! Because then there'd be a kind of monstrous unleashing of the id. Probably no good for society. Whatever thoughts needed to be expressed likely would be, despite the fear of being poorly received. Because there's a thrill in being honest! That thrill would likely motivate some adventurers or whatever.

The man pondered the idea of being honest with his wife and telling her he was bored and wanted adventure. Seemed like a terrible way to pay her back for loving him! And did he want her to be more honest with him? No way, absolutely not, Jesus Christ, no.

He benefited from repression, even though he hated it, of course.

But the thoughts just continued, in a stream, in a torrent, totally unanswerable. They were the basic building blocks of his life—the stuff he had to work with. It was up to him to decide which, if any, were worth devoting more time to.

AFTERWORD

I read Fleishmann Is In Trouble recently, which I absolutely loved. What a masterful, well-structured book, with so much to say about the nature of marriage and modern life, career, motherhood, parenthood, etc. Hype very much merited.

But as I was reading the book I definitely had the thought (that I'm sure other people have had as well) that Toby is a bit too good. Like, he loves his job as a liver doctor, he cares about his patients, he enjoys spending time with his kids and taking care of them, and in his sexual adventures he's so vanilla and everything seems so consensual—he's so understanding (even mentally!) of people rejecting him, etc. He decides at one point not to even look at women who are under 38, not only because of the creep factor, but because he genuinely is just less attracted to them and doesn’t want to spend time with much-younger women (something he mentions at several points).

The book makes a smart choice in that it's being told by a first-person narrator who's a friend of Toby. So she doesn't have access to his thoughts necessarily (though she acts like she does). And it totally makes sense that he’s mentally a bit neutered. Because even with the universe of the book, we eventually come to be aware that this house-wife friend is, more or less, using Toby’s story as a vehicle for airing her own frustrations.

It's a great book! So capacious, so wonderful.

But...I do think that Toby probably also has some thoughts that're a little more unreconstructed than what we see in the book. Like, do we really think this guy, who has all these insecurities from being short and fat as a kid, doesn’t on some level hate women? I mean we see that he hates his ex-wife (at least a bit), but he has genuine reason to hate her, so it doesn’t really read as misogyny.

Today’s piece is also inspired by my thoughts earlier this week on stream of consciousness, and about how the thoughts need to be a little rawer and more taboo if it's actually going to work! Even in the case of this story, I do not think anyone would want to read a novel in this voice. Nor would I even want to write one! I struggled to find a finish for this piece, because when you write a story like this one, which has an an everyman protagonist, the contract with the reader is that this man is unexceptional. But then to go sooooo deeply into their thoughts kind of breaks the contract, as I said in my last post, because the average interior monologue is so banal (mine included!) that the moment you commit an interior monologue to paper, then by the very act of making it readable, you're rendering it exceptional.

And I do think the protagonist of this story is unusually thoughtful and sensitive! But why would someone with an exceptional inner monologue not also have an exceptional life? So then you as a writer have to create some kind of story constraints to prevent them from acting (e.g. maybe his wife is sick), and it all becomes a very constructed exercise.

I think in most books about very reflective protagonists, if the author is being honest, then eventually the protagonist needs to take action. Like I read this book last year, Darryl, by Jackie Ess. And it’s not really stream of consciousness, but the narrator has a lot of thoughts to share with you (in this case they’re about cuckolding). But what made the book great is that Darryl is on a journey! He’s not just a bore who’s gonna tell you how cuckolding is so wonderful, etc. He’s gonna delve into what exactly makes it great, and what he wants, and how to find a satisfying life using these newly-revealed desires. Another great book!

I was talking to a friend recently about American Psycho and how the beauty of the book is that Patrick Bateman is actually a better person, much more soulful, etc, than the other guys he works with. That all the murdering isn't really an expression of his emptiness—it's the opposite, the murdering is his refusal to be the empty robot that society wants him to be. Obviously murdering isn't very good! But within the book, it's good. Without the murdering, he wouldn't really be worth reading about. It's the same with my protagonist—at some point, he's really gotta go and murder someone, I guess.

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Honestly, the Mahabharata itself (which I’m still waking up at 5:30 AM every morning to read) often gives me a bit of a stream of consciousness vibe, because it’s such an utter, inexhaustible torrent!¹ The stories just keep coming!² So many you can’t even keep track. Just this vast ocean of, well, I want to call it “human experience” but it’s not that obviously. Still, it’s a vast ocean of stories that have a very human quality. And I do think (although I have to do some more research into it), that there was often a kind of improvisational quality to oral storytelling, and that this improvisation is exactly what’s captured by the distinction between smriti and sruti. That there was stuff the Vedic listener expected to be memorized and unchanged (like the Vedas themselves), but then there was other stuff that was just…stories. You didn’t expect it to be unchanged. The teller could add or change or interpolate things, and that was expected.

Anyway, with stream of consciousness you try to create something of the impression of how the human mind works, whereas the Mahabharata uses its incredible fertility and breadth to give an impression of the varied nature of dharma. You can’t say in any given situation what’s the right or wrong thing to do, but there is some principle (i.e. dharma), some sense of right, that governs in each case and determines what people should do. And although that’s the explicit message of the Mahabharata, it’s actually a message that is conveyed equally well (or better) by its form, by the very profusion of situations and of conflicts that arise!

But…it only works because it’s actually very readable (even in translation) on a page by page level. That’s the incredible achievement. Obviously if you said, “I am going to write a ten thousand page compendium of interlocking stories that enumerates the principle of the dharma, and it how it operates in both major and minor ways” that would sound amazing! But to actually do it, and make it readable, that is a mind-blowing achievement. Honestly incredible—a bit like how when I first read Proust, I was like…how can this possibly exist? What mind could possibly have conceived this project and brought it to fruition? In ambition and scope, it is so far beyond anything else that exists.

And I still kinda feel that (about Proust). But…the Mahabharata wasn’t created by an individual mind. It’s the product of an entire society. Still a very impressive achievement though.

1. I wrote more about the Mahabharata in a post a few weeks ago.

2. Right now I’m midway through the fourth volume. The Pandavas are done with their exile, and they want their kingdom back. They’ve sent peace terms to their uncle, Dhiritashthra, and there was a long scene at his court where he argued about whether to take the offer.

What’s so complex about the Mahabharata is that every good character has a shadow figure on the other side who in some ways reveals their vices. For instance, Yudhisthira and Dhiritashthra are very similar. They’re both physically rather weak (compared to their families). They both understand the dharma and don’t really desire personal power. They’re both being goaded into this war by their loved ones (in Dhiritashthra’s case it’s his son, Duryodhana, while in Yudhisthira’s case it’s his wife, Draupadi). We see them struggle in very similar ways to avoid this war. Ultimately, Yudhisthira goes to war because he is persuaded it’s the right thing to do, while Dhiritashthra never really believes it is! He just gets bullied into it! But the difference between them is very subtle (as is the difference between, say, the wronged Draupadi and the envious Duryodhana).

The level of nuance is very novelistic in its effect, especially because there is so much discussion, and the net effect of all this talking feels very similar to interior monologue. Generally in premodern books you don’t get any of the character’s thoughts, but when Dhiritashthra, for instance, calls his brother Vidura to his side in the middle of the night to explain the nature of the dharma to him, we definitely get the feeling of a man struggling with his own conscience.