The Selfishness of Others by Kristin Dombek

Author:Kristin Dombek
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374712549
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Murderer

Still, there is the murderer. In prison, he is no longer smiling. This is a relief; it is especially when he smiles that he travels across the edge of what we can bear to include as human, because that’s when he looks most like someone we might like to know. It’s uncanny: what is monstrous, strange, inhuman, looks, for a moment, too much like what is familiar, normal, human. Or vice versa—the familiar and warm looks, for a moment, too much like what is strange and cold.

* * *

We know this already; uncanny is our everyday word for a surprising resemblance.

* * *

He complains of his conditions: his PlayStation does not have the games he likes, his room lacks a view, and all he wants to do is write apocalyptic memoirs and manifestos about how women and Muslims are growing in power and must be overcome but the rubber pen he’s been given cramps his hand. In a twenty-seven-page letter to the government of Norway, this man who has murdered seventy-seven people describes said pen as “an almost indescribable manifestation of sadism.”

* * *

It is against coldness, our story about the narcissism epidemic, and wants connection. It wants empathy, this movie about how the murderer’s disorder is contagious, about the cold calculators among the next generation, next door, in your house, in your bed. It expresses a great longing for kindness. The sensation of understanding among people is the story’s great, forsaken good. A lift in mood: Maybe the story’s popularity, these days, implies an epidemic exactly opposite to the one it describes. Maybe it shows an increase in how much we now cherish kindness; we deplore and fear narcissists because empathy is, increasingly, our highest value.

But the moment you begin to find that the other lacks empathy—when you find him inhuman—is a moment when you can’t feel empathy, either.

* * *

On a subway platform, the writer is searching through her bag because she’s had an idea so important it must be remembered and delivered to the world. Her hand comes out of her bag covered in ink: the pen has broken, everything is ruined. In a tiny and insignificant moment of the day, beyond which in this instant she cannot see, she rages for a moment at the cruelty of the world and all its shitty pens.

* * *

“We are in apocalypse,” like a script we act out, again and again. The script, Keller writes, is neither good nor bad. Sometimes it helps us leave awful relationships, flee genocide, start revolutions; sometimes, though, it’s a “civilizational habit.” We get addicted, imagine the evil that is growing in power is outside us, and then the movie we’re in enables our “numb complicity” in the disasters that are happening. When what you do is scripted, it is meaningful, but you’re not really responsible. Sometimes, on the other hand, being in apocalypse leads us to some righteous violence we think is heroic. The murderer is “in apocalypse,” in this sense, but

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.