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"It's fine," he said in the kind of cold, flat voice that only someone with serious Asperger's would take at face value.
Hannah's expression indicated to Nate that she did not suffer from Asperger's syndrome.
Nate looked away, a little repelled by the near panic he'd seen on her face. He was also afraid that if he looked at her, he'd feel bad and apologize, and he didn't want to feel bad or apologize. [...]
jesus, this is so blatantly passive-aggressive, it hurts to even read it
She made a sarcastic comment about Nate's "artfully crafted sentences," which, she said, mimicked true feeling without knowing what it was. He imitated the stylistic devices of writers he admired without realizing that for those writers these weren't mere devices but means of expressing something true.
something to keep in mind i guess
Then Nate looked at her face and saw that she'd been crying. She had tried to cover it up. No, that wasn't quite right. She looked as if she'd made a halfhearted attempt to cover it up but what she really wanted was for him to know that she was upset and ask what was wrong.
man relationships are tough
At the park, he had thought Hannah was unreasonable when she accused him of not trying, but now he wondered if he had, at some point, stacked the deck against her - decided he didn't want her and then set things up so she'd justify his slackening interest. Because he knew - of course he knew, he wasn't stupid - that his behavior had contributd to, if not entirely caused, her insecurity. And of course her insecurity [...] just made her more annoying. But it had felt as if he couldn't help the way he behaved. [...]
[...] After a couple of months, he asked her, why him? [...] What she said was sweet, but Nate was still partly unsatisfied. IT felt exogenous to him, to the real him.
[...] My mother says, This one will never be satisfied with anything. I think I'm beginning to see my life. From now on I treat that word and my life as inseparable. I think I have a vague desire to be alone, just as I realize I've never been alone any more since I left childhood behind, and the family of the hunter. I'm going to write. That's what I see beyond the present moment, in the great desert in whose form my life stretches out before me.
My doubts relate more to the fact that now, when I look back on that time, another completely different image occurs to me as the source of that impulse; and judging by this image, the initial impulse arose from a conversation I had with a friend. I’d told this friend about an experience of mine that had been extremely transcendental, and I’d told him how difficult it would be to turn it into a story. According to my theory, there are some extraordinary experiences that can’t be written about without becoming denatured; it’s impossible to set them down on paper. My friend insisted that if I wrote it just as I’d told it that night, I’d have a beautiful story; and that not only would I be able to write it, but that writing it was my duty.
I almost certainly won’t manage. Experience has taught me that. And yet I find myself hoping things will be different this time, because the grant is involved. I’ve already been sent the first half of the money, which will be enough to keep me until the end of the year in a reasonable life of leisure. As soon as I knew for certain I was getting the grant this year, I began more or less clearing my schedule, getting rid of some things altogether and spacing others out, so as to leave very few days each month when I have any commitments at all. You see, a life of leisure takes time to arrange. It doesn’t come about just like that, from one moment to the next, simply because you have nothing to do. At the moment my instinct is to fill every gap, devoting all my free time to stupid, pointless activities, because, almost without realising it, I have become like those people I always look down on: intensely afraid of my own selfhood, of being alone with nothing to do, of the ghosts in the basement pushing at the trapdoor, eager to poke their heads out and give me a fright.
I read the questionnaires, and while I was reading them I composed my responses in my head. The questions addressed a multitude of personal topics and referred to my life history from birth to the present day. Each one had only a limited space for the answer, and yet each one deserved a response that was almost infinitely long, or at least spanning a volume or more, and not the slim ones either. For example: your relationship and its problems. Which relationship? All of them? Wow … Please describe in five lines the problems with every relationship you’ve ever had. He might as well have set the questionnaire out as one of those multiple-choice exams. There were also questions about professional matters: how do I get on with my bosses, with my subordinates, etc. Bosses? Does anyone have a boss in this world? And subordinates? God forbid. In other words, I saw how the whole thing was shaping up: therapy for builders, office workers and executives. If you don’t fit into one of those categories, it’s because you’re mad. There must be something wrong with you if you’re a free person.
lol
Chl is still making progress with her therapy; it’s interesting to see how she’s opening up to topics that she used to be very closed to. These days she talks easily about things that were once completely off limits, or too painful to address. She told me on the phone that today she attacked the therapist (attacked him verbally, that is). A positive development. But then she regretted it, or at least she was worried about it. She feels sorry for people too easily. She always puts herself in the other person’s place and suffers over things they probably don’t care about at all.
lol same