The Best American Essays 2015 (7 page)

Elizabeth and I shouted, out of tune, running ahead of the other kids. We sang songs by our favorite band, My Chemical Romance—we were in love with the singer, white makeup spread over his face, who screamed and trembled in music videos, glowering at the camera beneath a lop of black hair—and finished the chorus of the best song together.

So long, and goodnight; so long and goodnight!

When the hunt was over, my mother gathered everyone in the living room and pulled out her camera. In the photographs Elizabeth and I are surrounded by neighbor kids, mostly Tiggers and fairies. There is pride in my face, for the completeness of the costume, the long black veil stitched together from scraps. We stand apart from the group slightly, leaning into each other, smiling.

We spent the year with books, taking turns reading aloud while the other sewed or painted with the oils we saved up for. Our pictures were misshapen and artless. Her favorite, a distorted woman sitting at a piano, hung over her bedroom window. The woman was naked except for her hair, which was long and black like Elizabeth's.

One of our books was
Dracula.

“Denn die Toten reiten schnell,”
she read one afternoon while I sewed stringy black hairs onto the head of a doll I was making. The doll's name was Victoria and she had a scar of a seam running vertically through her face, mismatched buttons for eyes. Her limbs were long and her mouth was wide and jagged. I tattooed her name onto her back and gave her dress a black satin bow.

“What does it mean?”

“For the dead travel fast.”

We pierced our ears until they prickled with metal, punching new holes after school, dipping the needle in rubbing alcohol and holding each other's hair out of the way—a stinging, a
pop-pop
as the point broke the skin. We filled the holes with fake diamonds, red and black.

In front of the bathroom mirror, we painted our faces with white makeup, eyeliner, lipstick the color of old blood. At sixteen, we decayed. Our skin gathered in the asthmatic carpet of the bathroom. We left pieces of our bodies in the dark corners of my house on the afternoons we ventured there, eyelashes drifting in the shadows between rafters on the redwood ceiling, floating away from us, only to grow back. We crumbled under a light snow on Mountain View Drive, when the sky was huge and gray above Wheeler Crest. We fell apart in the halls of our tiny high school, where our lockers were pocked with bullet-hole stickers and the roof caved in every winter from the weight of snow.

I went around in a black Hello Kitty T-shirt that read
Lost in Wonderland.
My belt shed metal spikes the janitor found under desks after class, empty pyramids with barbs that dug into the plastic. Teachers with intuition let me sit in the back and deconstruct my mechanical pencil.

In school we were a half-presence. We didn't do homework. We memorized Edgar Allan Poe's “The Raven,” filled notebooks with sketches, drew on our bodies and clothing with Sharpie—lyrics, complex roses, women with wings. We jabbed pencils through denim and ripped holes in our jeans. Elizabeth, who had to conceal even pierced ears from Russell, shredded her pants in two-inch increments, exposing strips of pale flesh from ankle to thigh. I walked in front of her, hiding her, when we came through the front door after school.

We filled in class assignments with clues to our lives. A teacher told us to keep a journal, to log the songs that defined us. I recorded my favorite: “It's Not a Fashion Statement, It's a Fucking Deathwish.”

You get what everyone else gets
, the singer growls,
you get a lifetime.

Standing at the mirror on autumn nights, the slippery skin of our arms touching, we could hear the rain. Elizabeth wore black feathered wings. She painted a slice across her throat. Outside our faces might smear, but we were not alone or lonely. We could almost feel our pulses slow slightly, our skin cool, our limbs stiffen. We were ready.

We left the house while Russell slept. Sara whimpered, then hushed at Elizabeth's arched eyebrow. Once outside, we walked. The rain fell on our bodies, chilling us through black sweatshirts with enormous hoods that hid our faces so well in class. In the morning when the darkness cleared and the sun shone in our eyes, we would wake with clean skin, ribs rising and falling, and we would remember these nights when we shivered together in the coming winter.

Elizabeth almost escaped. Under her window that looked over the mountain, with nothing and no one for hundreds of miles, she tried and she failed. While Russell slumped on the sofa in front of a cooking show, Elizabeth missed the radial artery. Kneeling on the floor, Seether playing quietly on the stereo, she looked out the window and she waited, but it never came. She lived, her life would go on; she would find the drugs so prevalent in small towns, she would drop out of school. I would get used to eating lunch by myself, in the dark hall by the band room where we once sat together, throwing a sticky eyeball at the wall and watching it roll to the floor.

I knew, to her, life seemed very long.

On winter nights, while Elizabeth's skin healed to pink shiny scars, I returned to my silent house, the lights already off and my father asleep. The counter was clustered with uneaten lasagna and unwatered lilies, a thousand condolences from neighbors who tried with a new desperation to talk to me in the car. They wondered at my charade, the romance of what had taken my mother away, painted over my lips, over my eyes. With makeup gone I was undeniably warm and living, and I shook with the realization that perhaps we were not as beautiful as we were permanent.

ISAIAH BERLIN

FROM
The New York Review of Books

On November 25, 1994, Isaiah Berlin accepted the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto. He prepared the following “short credo,” as he called it in a letter to a friend, for the ceremony, at which it was read on his behalf. Twenty years later, on October 23, 2014
, The New York Review of Books
printed Berlin's remarks for the first time. For more on Isaiah Berlin, please see the Contributors' Notes.

“I
T WAS THE
best of times, it was the worst of times.” With these words Dickens began his famous novel
A Tale of Two Cities.
But this cannot, alas, be said about our own terrible century. Men have for millennia destroyed each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath: the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for years—these are unparalleled. They were not natural disasters but preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been averted.

I speak with particular feeling, for I am a very old man, and I have lived through almost the entire century. My life has been peaceful and secure, and I feel almost ashamed of this in view of what has happened to so many other human beings. I am not a historian, and so I cannot speak with authority on the causes of these horrors. Yet perhaps I can try.

They were, in my view, not caused by the ordinary negative human sentiments, as Spinoza called them—fear, greed, tribal hatreds, jealousy, love of power—though of course these have played their wicked part. They have been caused, in our time, by ideas; or rather, by one particular idea. It is paradoxical that Karl Marx, who played down the importance of ideas in comparison with impersonal social and economic forces, should, by his writings, have caused the transformation of the twentieth century, both in the direction of what he wanted and, by reaction, against it. The German poet Heine, in one of his famous writings, told us not to underestimate the quiet philosopher sitting in his study; if Kant had not undone theology, he declared, Robespierre might not have cut off the head of the king of France.

He predicted that the armed disciples of the German philosophers—Fichte, Schelling, and the other fathers of German nationalism—would one day destroy the great monuments of Western Europe in a wave of fanatical destruction before which the French Revolution would seem child's play. This may have been unfair to the German metaphysicians, yet Heine's central idea seems to me valid: in a debased form, the Nazi ideology did have roots in German anti-Enlightenment thought. There are men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience under the influence of the words and writings of some of those who are certain that they know perfection can be reached.

Let me explain. If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed this after reading
Das Kapital
, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any.

The root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be discovered. It can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose word is law. The idea that to all genuine questions there can be only one true answer is a very old philosophical notion. The great Athenian philosophers, Jews and Christians, the thinkers of the Renaissance and the Paris of Louis XIV, the French radical reformers of the eighteenth century, the revolutionaries of the nineteenth—however much they differed about what the answer was or how to discover it (and bloody wars were fought over this)—were all convinced that they knew the answer, and that only human vice and stupidity could obstruct its realization.

This is the idea of which I spoke, and what I wish to tell you is that it is false. Not only because the solutions given by different schools of social thought differ, and none can be demonstrated by rational methods—but for an even deeper reason. The central values by which most men have lived, in a great many lands at a great many times—these values, almost if not entirely universal, are not always harmonious with each other. Some are, some are not. Men have always craved for liberty, security, equality, happiness, justice, knowledge, and so on. But complete liberty is not compatible with complete equality—if men were wholly free, the wolves would be free to eat the sheep. Perfect equality means that human liberties must be restrained so that the ablest and the most gifted are not permitted to advance beyond those who would inevitably lose if there were competition. Security, and indeed freedoms, cannot be preserved if freedom to subvert them is permitted. Indeed, not everyone seeks security or peace, otherwise some would not have sought glory in battle or in dangerous sports.

Justice has always been a human ideal, but it is not fully compatible with mercy. Creative imagination and spontaneity, splendid in themselves, cannot be fully reconciled with the need for planning, organization, careful and responsible calculation. Knowledge, the pursuit of truth—the noblest of aims—cannot be fully reconciled with the happiness or the freedom that men desire, for even if I know that I have some incurable disease this will not make me happier or freer. I must always choose: between peace and excitement, or knowledge and blissful ignorance. And so on.

So what is to be done to restrain the champions, sometimes very fanatical, of one or other of these values, each of whom tends to trample upon the rest, as the great tyrants of the twentieth century have trampled on the life, liberty, and human rights of millions because their eyes were fixed upon some ultimate golden future?

I am afraid I have no dramatic answer to offer: only that if these ultimate human values by which we live are to be pursued, then compromises, trade-offs, arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to happen. So much liberty for so much equality, so much individual self-expression for so much security, so much justice for so much compassion. My point is that some values clash: the ends pursued by human beings are all generated by our common nature, but their pursuit has to be to some degree controlled—liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I repeat, may not be fully compatible with each other, nor are liberty, equality, and fraternity.

So we must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the crushing of one form of life by its rivals. I know only too well that this is not a flag under which idealistic and enthusiastic young men and women may wish to march—it seems too tame, too reasonable, too bourgeois, it does not engage the generous emotions. But you must believe me, one cannot have everything one wants—not only in practice, but even in theory. The denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood—eggs are broken, but the omelet is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end the passionate idealists forget the omelet and just go on breaking eggs.

I am glad to note that toward the end of my long life some realization of this is beginning to dawn. Rationality, tolerance, rare enough in human history, are not despised. Liberal democracy, despite everything, despite the greatest modern scourge of fanatical, fundamentalist nationalism, is spreading. Great tyrannies are in ruins, or will be—even in China the day is not too distant. I am glad that you to whom I speak will see the twenty-first century, which I feel sure can be only a better time for mankind than my terrible century has been. I congratulate you on your good fortune; I regret that I shall not see this brighter future, which I am convinced is coming. With all the gloom that I have been spreading, I am glad to end on an optimistic note. There really are good reasons to think that it is justified.