Read Online How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti - Free Book Online Page B

save the world. If it only saves three people, I will not be happy. If with this play the oil crisis is merely averted and our standard of living maintains itself at its current level, I will weep into my oatmeal. If this play does anything short of announcing the arrival of the next cock—­I mean, messiah— I will shit into my oatmeal.
    Who among us will be asked to lead the people out of bondage, only to say, God, I have never been a good talker. Ask someone ­else. Ask my brother instead of me. There is no way to accomplish what I feel I must accomplish with this play. There is no way in heaven or on earth! I am the wrong person to do it. Look at the shitty red hoodie I am sitting ­here in. Look at my dirty running shoes. I have such small breasts. God, shouldn’t you call upon a woman with great big knockers, who the people will listen to? Why do you call on me, who ­doesn’t have the cleavage to capture the world’s attention? Ask my sister instead of me, whose big breasts are much more suited to doing your work.
    May the Lord have mercy on me for I am a fucking idiot. But I live in a culture of fucking idiots. I cannot be saved if not everyone is saved. If everyone around me talks nothing but shit, how can I hold myself aloof? My fate is not separate from everyone’s fate. If one man or one woman can stand up and call themselfs saved, that means we all are. And I know I’m not, so no one is.
    Last night someone said to me, “Come on—­all the five, six times I have seen you, you have been drunk out of your mind.” I was drunk last night too, when he was telling it to me. I resented the implication that I had been, in the five, six times we had seen each other, any drunker than he had been. For we are all, all of us, drunk all the time, and it’s not fair for him to single me out like that and make me the exception, when if it comes to the drinking habits in the circles I run in, I am the rule. The rule is: drink as much as you can afford to drink. We all, anyway, work better when we are drunk, or wake up the next morning, hungover. In either case, we lack the capacity to second-­guess ourselves.
    People say there is no direction to evolution—­upward to any height; that the proper meta­phor is the outward webbing of a bush, not the striving of a tree toward the heavens. When we ­were children, we would lift our arms to the skies as high as we could—­as tall as we could make ourselves— stretch, stretch, stretch! When I look back on those gym classes and how we all stretched ourselves to be as tall as the tallest tree, I ­can’t help but think, Those ­were the most religious moments of my life.
    If now in some ways I drink too much, it’s not that I lack a reverence for the world.
    Today I am fasting. A girl I know who is a semifamous singer, and who is very slender and glamorous in pictures, once told me that when she has been eating badly, she will fast for a day or two. She said that Nietz­sche made her think that her self-­denial and need for purification ­were vulgar bullshit, but then she said no to Nietzsche—­she sees no reason she shouldn’t enjoy emptying out, the same as she enjoys exploiting abundance.
    The other night out at the bars, I learned that Nietz­sche wrote on a typewriter. It is unbelievable to me, and I no longer feel that his philosophy has the same validity or aura of truth that it formerly did. No other detail of his life situ ating him so squarely in the modern age could have affected me as much as learning this. He typed Zarathustra ? Goddamnit, the man had no more connection to the truth than a stenographer!
    Knowing this, I don’t see why I don’t just kick it all to hell and shut up at last about my concern that I might put more shit into the world. The world is full to brimming with its own shit. A little more from me won’t even make a