His real life, outside of our destination, was complicated by ambivalence. Since childhood, his basic needs had been met as if by an invisible force. At first, he believed his mother and father were providing for him, but when they died, he was surprised to feel that he had suffered no loss. He envied the fact that people like me didn’t have desires, as we were still struggling to fulfill our basic needs. His own desires felt paralyzing, because none of them were motivated by need. Everything was available to be possessed, which made it impossible to quantify any particular object’s allure. He wished he felt more lust for his mistress. I tried to relate to him and understand his concerns.

I asked the woman if she liked the president and his wife. She told me that she didn’t like them or dislike them, because she wasn’t interested in them as individuals but as representative historical actors. I didn’t know what she meant by that, “representative historical actors,” so I asked her to clarify. She told me that politicians pretended to have personalities, but their idiosyncrasies were just traits they developed in order to get elected. For most voters, it was less important for a candidate to have a coherent ideology than it was for them to have a dog, a second home, or a sense of humor. It was necessary to cut through all of that, she said, if one wished to have a grasp on one’s place in history. She seemed excited by that idea, having a grasp on one’s place in history, but then she sighed, so I wasn’t sure if she was excited or felt some other emotion. Unfortunately, she said, the American people had no sense of history. They believed that everything that came before them was irrelevant, except insofar as it had given them what they needed. They hoped that their children would have children, and that those children would believe in hardship the way they themselves had once believed in fairy tales.