How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life by Sheila Heti

Author:Sheila Heti [Heti, Sheila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-06-18T20:00:00+00:00

I don’t want 00:00:00 anymore. It is banal. Yet in the pitch-perfect moments of life, I say to myself that I have followed my rules wisely, and that the surge of sublimity that flows within me is the gods’ reward.

Now when I wake in the mornings, I look out the window in the hopes that a policeman on a horse will pass by. When it doesn’t happen, I untangle myself from the sheets and get up and go to the mirror to start my day. I produce a haughty, superior expression to intimidate myself into thinking I’m cool, cooler than I am. I make my eyes as world-weary as possible, like a fashion model’s, then I think, You’re a charlatan. You love everything you were ever given.

I want more than to appear sufficiently cool in my own eyes—though this would be admitting that all my vanity and primping has been a waste. Every glance into the mirror and the expressions I’ve contrived to intimidate myself—fatuous. It is perhaps better to continue along the path toward beauty I have started on, and to hope that, if I am rigorous enough in following this path, it will lead me somewhere great. Then, if I do succeed in turning myself into an idol, it will not have been for nothing.

I am not thinking of the one who said that in order to gain life, you have to lose it. If I lose it, I will be like the earth spinning off its axis into infinity, and who knows, without being something I can gaze at and admire, if I will ever find my way back.

But I can only imagine what would happen to all the stuff of the earth if the earth was to spin off its axis. I think trees would crash into cars, but I don’t know enough science to say.

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