by Lucille Lorenz
What does it mean to be able to think beautifully? What does it mean to not be able to live?
I discovered Hemingway for the first time when I was 16. It was during one of the worst periods of my life. We’d been in lockdown for around a year at that point, and I was on the brink of a psychological breakdown. I picked up Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and digested the terse, heartbreaking prose from within the confines of my slowly deteriorating mind. I loved it. One of the worst things about me: I love literature the most when I’m the least mentally well. Sometimes, I don’t know whether I’d rather be happy or passionate. Lately, I’ve been becoming more and more convinced that I can’t be both at once.
These past two semesters of my life haven’t quite felt real. During the spring semester of my freshman year of college, I had a medical emergency, needed surgery, found out that this medical emergency was actually the result of an underlying condition I’d had undiagnosed for several years, needed another surgery, wasn’t able to schedule said-surgery until after my finals, and then needed to be on a liquid-diet for two weeks leading up to and during my exams. All of this was a prelude to my perfect summer: I’d gotten a grant to take some classes at Berkeley during our first summer-session, before I’d be leaving to study abroad at University of Cambridge. Since I’d be turning 19 abroad, my mom helped me schedule a trip to Paris to celebrate. Lots of my classmates go abroad for every family vacation they’ve had. For me, though, getting the email that I’d been accepted to study abroad was one of the most exciting and surreal moments of my life. Exactly a year from then, I’d never been out of the country.
While in Paris, I decided to visit the Pablo Picasso museum. I love going to art museums, even though I think that I probably am not able to appreciate art in the way that I should. Visual art feels strangely detached to me—I can see when things are beautiful to me, and I can see when things should move me, but there’s a certain feeling I get deep down when I read good literature, and I’ve seldom had that feeling at an art museum. For the first half of my trip to that museum, I found it informative and interesting. I learned a lot from the placards, and I felt I was able to appreciate Picasso in a new way. But then we entered the room for his blue period. And then I saw Portrait d’homme.
It was like looking in a mirror. I couldn’t move, and I could hardly breathe. I remember thinking I wanted a way to memorialize this moment, but that it felt sacrilegious to pull out my phone to take a picture. I was frozen, staring at the painting. I understood; it made so much sense to me.
I know nearly nothing about visual art or art criticism, and so really, I have nothing to say about this painting that would be worth reading. Except that, over winter break last year, I got news that one of my high school classmates had been murdered, and I couldn’t do anything except sit down on the floor of my bedroom and stare at a wall, and it felt disrespectful to him to move, so I just sat there and stared until my eyes went blurry and eventually fell asleep. And when I was a freshman in high school, I had my first experience with depression, except I didn’t really know what depression was at the time and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do about it, so I used to sit in my history class and stare at the wall, imagining that I was in a completely dark, completely silent room, and that nothing around me existed. And when I was a freshman in college, while I was experiencing my medical issues, I became obsessed with the idea that my academic excellence was the only thing that could give me a life worth living. I forced myself to study for nearly every hour of the day, feeling guilty every time my mind wandered. I had to take an allergy test, for which I pricked my finger and let blood slide gently out of me, onto a sheet of crisp white paper underneath me. I couldn’t do anything for several minutes, except stare at my own blood, thinking about the strange sense of relief and catharsis I was feeling, thinking you shouldn’t like looking at your blood this much; you can’t do this again; you like this too much—you can never do this again.
And all of those times, I felt the same: I felt the way I felt staring at Portrait d’homme—I felt like I was Portrait d’homme. It was blunt, and empty, but it was filled with something that exists so far down inside of me that I don’t think my own words are up to the task of digging deep enough to retrieve whatever it is that I’m trying to say.
Majoring in comparative literature means that I spend a lot of time in my own mind, studying the products of people who had spent a lot of time alone in their own minds. As someone without experience in creative writing, but who consumes it all the time, I wonder a lot about the process of creating fiction. It seems to me that all of the best novels were created out of a deep sense of lack. In The Sun Also Rises this is especially true: it seems as though the entire novel balances on the things that it doesn’t have. It’s the corpse of a love story that never got to exist: the novel seems built on the relationship between Brett and Jake—a relationship that never ultimately happens, because Jake, in the bluntest terms, was injured in war, rendering him unable to fuck her. But the novel is rich, and it’s beautiful, and I have to believe that it is because of this fundamental lack that the rest of the novel—the settings, the friendships, the conversations, the anecdotes—are able to be so textured. If Jake and Brett could be together, I don’t think the novel would’ve had to exist. The writing is so gorgeous because our narrator needs something he doesn’t have; his narration stands in the place his own happiness should have been. Why is it that the things I find most beautiful are always so sad?
In my letter of recommendation for college, my high school teacher wrote that I have “a unique mind.” At the time, I remember being proud—the statement had been surrounded by praise of my “mental poise” and “academic excellence.” But I read it again recently, and it made me feel sick. I don’t think I want a unique mind. When I was in middle school, and still believed in God, I used to pray that I’d wake up in the morning and would have a new brain—one that thought less. I don’t know if having a “unique mind” is worth it; I don’t know if it will hold out. Where does my “intelligence” stop and my mental illness begin? Susan Sontag said that you shouldn’t be ashamed of being obsessive, because obsessive people create great art. But I don’t know if I can live like this anymore.
Every time I write something I’m proud of, it comes from a physical need: something crawling around my stomach, thrashing me around until I can get words onto paper. Every time I get an A on a paper or a test, it’s because I’d been convinced that I’d fail: that I’m the stupidest person on this campus, and that if I don’t stretch myself to some sort of limit, everyone will start seeing me the way I see myself. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it didn’t have to be like this? If I could feel normal, but still get praised for “brilliance”?
The Sun Also Rises ends in dialogue. Brett and Jake are sitting together in a taxi, and Brett finally acknowledges the truth that this whole novel is an elegy to:
“Oh Jake,” Brett said. “We could have had such a damned good life together.”
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Lucille Lorenz is currently a sophomore at UC Berkeley, where she studies comparative literature. She is on the editorial board of two undergraduate literary journals: Vagabond Multilingual Journal and The Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal. She is originally from South Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In her free time, she enjoys playing the cello.
After the Art 