A Partial History of Lost Causes Read Online Free PDF

straight.

    I was still in college then. There had been much agonizing over whether to give me my results so young, but I convinced everyone that it was the responsible thing—so I could plan whether to have children, so I could set the kind of short-term attainable goals that terminal people are so fond of. I employed depths of maturity and bullshit I didn’t even know I had at the time, talked philosophically and stoically, pretended to have a faith in God and a good attitude (of which I have neither). I met with a psychologist, and I said things like “I’m not going to let this thing beat me” and “It’s in the hands of the Lord.” Afterward, I collapsed and drew in on myself and fell into the dark depression I’d promised everyone I would avoid.
    Claire and I were living in a big gray two-story near Somerville that year. I was, I fear, very difficult. I stopped doing schoolwork. Claire dragged me through my Formal Logic problem sets. I stopped going to campus or eating. Claire brought me bagels and left them outside my door. I moped. I skulked. I monopolized our shower for hours, running all the hot water and using all the grapefruit shampoo, because it was the only place in the house where nobody could hear me crying.
    I started bringing home different men every weekend, and all Claire did was ask me to bring home cuter ones. “I know you’re having a breakdown, and I respect that,” she said. “I just think you could be doing better in this department.”
    Now, of course, it’s very different, and I look back on that time with a sort of bemused chagrin. It’s a wonder that I escaped collegewithout an unwanted pregnancy at the very least—full-blown AIDS at the worst. Somebody asked me about it once—a frat boy, strangely enough—as I was shrugging off the condom he dangled before me. “Don’t you worry about AIDS?” he said. And out loud I said no, not really, but in my head I thought, Please, please, please let me get AIDS so I can die of pneumonia, so my brain is the last thing out the door, so that when I die, it is actually me dying and not somebody else.

    I graduated somehow, barely. I majored in philosophy. A false premise yielding a false conclusion is logically valid, as I recall. Then I went for my doctorate in comparative literature. I studied Nabokov.
    Other people laugh about staying in academia their whole lives: spending an eternity earning a Ph.D., gathering up knowledge they can’t hope to practically employ, studying the countless refracted interpretations of a world they’ve never experienced. Being a perpetual academic is living in a potential energy that never becomes kinetic. I have trouble laughing about this.
    After college I calmed down considerably. I’m not out much, but very occasionally—once or twice in the past five years, let’s say—I’ll meet someone interesting, with a dry sense of humor and a dark intelligence, and I’ll know objectively that this is the kind of person whom, in another lifetime, I would want. I can see this other lifetime sometimes, if I squint, but I don’t particularly resent it. It’s like looking at other people’s vacation photos. And if there is an actual sense of loneliness or longing, it’s like feeling a human hand touch you through gauze—removed and almost unrecognizable.

    I began playing chess Saturdays in Harvard Square, against the old wizened men who charge you a dollar to lose to them. I did not grow up to be a chess prodigy—or any other kind, for that matter. But I find something compelling in the game’s choreography, the way one move implies the next. The kings are an apt metaphor for human beings: utterly constrained by the rules of the game, defenseless against bombardment from all sides, able only to temporarily dodge disaster by moving one step in any direction.
    The chess men emerged without comment in early March, sitting in the stoic steam of their coffees, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up