I thought about Ivan and felt regret and shame. I shouldn’t have told him that I wanted to understand him. I shouldn’t have wanted to understand him.
A student asking a question was sitting in an amazing posture: legs crossed at both the knee and the ankle, arms intertwined, elbows on the desk, fingers knit together, like his whole organic being aspired to be a French cruller.
“I mean,” he was saying, “if you look at that whole ontological crisis group in Pittsburgh . . .”
Some students laughed. Didn’t they see? Everyone wanted what they couldn’t have. Even this young fellow, bright, witty, everything going for him, wanted to be a cruller. Well, of course the flip side of desire was fear.
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At three in the morning, I logged on and typed finger varga. I had never before been able to bring myself to use the Unix command “finger,” because it sounded so disgusting, and also the thing it did was shameful—it showed you when and where another user had last logged in. A couple of seconds passed, and then the computer said: On since 02:43:10. It made me feel peaceful to see that he was online. I went to sleep and dreamed about a tremendously urbane guy called Phil Lang, who had lustrous hair and didn’t like me. It turned out he was the philosophy of language.
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Dear Selin,
There is this text editor, emacs. To exit, you have to press Ctrl-x and then quickly Ctrl-c. If you accidentally get into it, you can’t get out until you learn Ctrl-x-ctrl-c. Of course, you can ask help—Ctrl-h, easy—and another Ctrl-h tells you how to use the help. But then help fills up your screen and stays there. You could search help for “kill buffer” to hide help, but first you have to search help for how to search help. Finally, your friend tells you to print help. Then you get a 10-page single-spaced printout with two columns labeled KEY—BINDING. On the left, you have the combination of keys (Ctrl-ctrl, etc.). On the right, the “bindings”: cut-kill-region, kill-sentence, even transpose-sexpr.
This guy, emacs, knows a lot, but you have to learn his (her?) secret language. Some say that Microsoft Word is for kids, but emacs—it’s the God; the screen shakes under the keystrokes. Once you learn the key-bindings, you are fine. I am getting better, and I am afraid. What if everything I can learn in emacs is limited by 300 or so valid keystrokes? Do I still want to learn it then?
There is this thing with talking, you know.
I had been skimming through the message about the text editor, but at the line about talking, I came up short. I couldn’t believe it was there. I read it again and again. You asked me a real question now and that is stepping over some boundary. He said he was glad, because he had wanted to talk to me in his own voice, but had been afraid to trivialize our conversation, for reasons that, written here, would themselves trivialize it. If he met me in the street now, he would say hi and keep going, because—it feels right this way (I refuted all my rational arguments), because spoken language is so demystified, so simplistic, a trap. I would have to just say some of the keys of the few available bindings . . .
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I worried increasingly that I was the victim of some elaborate hoax. What if Ivan had concocted this whole pretentious correspondence, just to see how far I would go? I’m glad you’re finally talking to me directly, he wrote, in the middle of a flowery paragraph about how he wouldn’t talk to me if he saw me in the street. But what exactly was the con? The message had been posted at five-thirty, and Ivan had been logged on since two forty-five. Those were important, delicate hours. People didn’t give them up so easily. Why would anyone go through so much inconvenience just to mystify me? The idea flashed across my mind that it might be revenge, maybe not even conscious, for . . . But that seemed too nonsensical to contemplate. In the end, I thought, I had no choice but to assume he was being sincere. If it turned out he wasn’t, then so much the worse for him.
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Winter drew to a close. Gray dull snowbanks began melting to reveal all kinds of half-frozen garbage. The air smelled of dirt. You were always tripping over dead birds. Daffodils came up, just in time to be crippled by a late snowfall, which turned immediately into slush.
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Joaquín was late to our third meeting. I sat at the table and wrote some things I had been thinking about in a spiral notebook. I consulted my watch. Twenty minutes had passed. Joaquín had been punctual the last two times, so I started to feel worried. I found a list with the names and contact information for all the students. There was only one Joaquín but there was no phone number, just a street address.
A couple of days later, the office called and said that Joaquín wouldn’t be coming in anymore. He had had eye surgery and now he was blind.
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At the two-thirds mark of the school year, Hannah said she didn’t want the single room. She said she didn’t much like being alone, and was ceding her rights to Angela. So Angela moved back into the single and I moved back in with Hannah.
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My high school friend Hema mailed me a mixtape with a song by They Might Be Giants. There was a part where the guy warbled in his weird characteristic tone, at once plaintive, cheerful, and resigned:
No one knows these things but me and him,
So I’m writing everything down in a spiral notebook.
Again and again I listened to these lines, marveling at how accurately they described my life situation.
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I missed so many Russian classes that I got a letter from the Freshman Dean’s Office saying that I needed a signed letter from the instructor if I wanted to stay in the class. I went to Varvara’s office hours. She signed the letter right away and said I shouldn’t worry about the dean, but she had been noticing I hadn’t been myself this semester, and I might get a B.
“Is it because of your roommates?” she asked. I had forgotten that I had talked in class about my roommates. “I know that can be difficult,” she said. “I had to switch roommates in my first year at university.” I wondered for the first time whether she had gone to the university in East Germany, and what she had been like when she was a freshman.
I told her that things were going better with my roommates. She asked if there was anything else I wanted to talk about. She looked so kind and earnest, with her big gentle eyes and square jaw.
“Do you think the name Sonya is bad luck?” I blurted.
“How do you mean?”
“In Uncle Vanya, and in Crime and Punishment. Even in War and Peace, she’s pathetic, she’s . . .” I hesitated, not wanting to say the phrase Tolstoy had used, which was “sterile flower.”
“She doesn’t get the man,” said Varvara. I saw surprise and compassion in her eyes and sensed, with a flash of dread, that she knew what I was talking about.