Bookseer
A reading
For someone who cannot stop measuring
Part of you wants them to fail. Not badly, nothing cruel. Just a little, just enough that the distance closes.
You have never said this to anyone. You would not survive saying it. So it stays in you and does its work at eleven at night, on a lit screen, in a room where everyone else is asleep. Someone you sat next to at twenty has bought a house. Someone else has a second child and a book coming out.
You know the whole argument against this. Everyone posts their best day. Comparison is the thief of joy. You have made it to friends and meant it. It has never once worked on you at eleven at night.
These three do not argue. Two are written from inside the feeling, by people who refused to make themselves look good. The third takes the scoreboard away.
Envy
Yuri Olesha · 1927
Nikolai Kavalerov is picked up drunk from outside a bar by a successful man who makes sausages and loves the future, and put to sleep on a couch in his flat. From that couch he watches his benefactor be admired, and he begins to hate him with real style. Olesha gives envy the best sentences in the book, and that is why it survives: the man on the couch gets the language, and the man with the sausages gets the future. The borrowed dressing gown, the couch too short for him, the resentment kept warm like a small animal.
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Patricia Highsmith · 1955
Tom Ripley is sent to Italy to bring a rich man's son home and instead moves into his life, his shirts, his signature. Highsmith writes the wanting so closely that you follow Tom past the point where you should have stopped. It reads quickly, and too pleasantly. That is the use of it. What you are watching is the ordinary arithmetic of measuring yourself against one person, kept up until there is nothing of you left over.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy · 1886
Ivan Ilyich is a judge who has done everything correctly: the right career, the right marriage, the right furniture, each step weighed against what people of his sort were doing. Then a small pain in his side turns out to be fatal, and the scoreboard stops answering. Tolstoy spends the rest of the novella asking what the measuring was for. It is short, it is not gentle, and it does the one thing the usual advice cannot: it lets you see, from the end, how little of a life the comparison was ever counting.
Answer the questions and let the Oracle read you
