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A review by e333mily
How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
4.0
“In all of this, there was one overarching question that never left my side, an ongoing task that could never be called complete, though I hoped one day it would be: What was the right way to react to people? Who was I to talk to at parties? How was I to be?”
“For so long I had been looking hard into every person I met, hoping I might discover in them all the thoughts and feelings I hoped life would give me but hadn't.”
“They must work — without escaping into fantasies about being the person who worked. And I don't mean work for its own sake; but they must choose work that begins and ends in a passion, a question that is gnawing at their guts, which is not to be avoided but must be realized and lived through hard work and the suffering that inevitably comes with the process.”
“My panic increased as I thought of ways I could take my decision back, trying to remind myself meanwhile that the point of life was not to avoid suffering — that any choice involved suffering — and that in choosing to leave the salon, I was choosing one kind of suffering, while choosing to stay would involve another, whereas going back and forth as I was doing now was the worst kind of suffering of all, as it was an attempt to avoid life, which would leave me finally with nothing.”
“For so long I had been looking hard into every person I met, hoping I might discover in them all the thoughts and feelings I hoped life would give me but hadn't.”
“They must work — without escaping into fantasies about being the person who worked. And I don't mean work for its own sake; but they must choose work that begins and ends in a passion, a question that is gnawing at their guts, which is not to be avoided but must be realized and lived through hard work and the suffering that inevitably comes with the process.”
“My panic increased as I thought of ways I could take my decision back, trying to remind myself meanwhile that the point of life was not to avoid suffering — that any choice involved suffering — and that in choosing to leave the salon, I was choosing one kind of suffering, while choosing to stay would involve another, whereas going back and forth as I was doing now was the worst kind of suffering of all, as it was an attempt to avoid life, which would leave me finally with nothing.”