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We Learn Nothing
“Kreider locates the right simile and the pith of situations as he carefully catalogues humanity’s inventive and manifold ways of failing” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
In We Learn Nothing, satirical cartoonist Tim Kreider turns his funny, brutally honest eye to the dark truths of the human condition, asking big questions about human-sized problems: What if you survive a brush with death and it doesn’t change you? Why do we fall in love with people we don’t even like? How do you react when someone you’ve known for years unexpectedly changes genders?
With a perfect combination of humor and pathos, these essays, peppered with Kreider’s signature cartoons, leave us with newfound wisdom and a unique prism through which to examine our own chaotic journeys through life. These are the conversations you have only with best friends or total strangers, late at night over drinks, near closing time.
This edition also includes the sensationally popular essay “The Busy Trap,” as seen in the New York Times.
In We Learn Nothing, satirical cartoonist Tim Kreider turns his funny, brutally honest eye to the dark truths of the human condition, asking big questions about human-sized problems: What if you survive a brush with death and it doesn’t change you? Why do we fall in love with people we don’t even like? How do you react when someone you’ve known for years unexpectedly changes genders?
With a perfect combination of humor and pathos, these essays, peppered with Kreider’s signature cartoons, leave us with newfound wisdom and a unique prism through which to examine our own chaotic journeys through life. These are the conversations you have only with best friends or total strangers, late at night over drinks, near closing time.
This edition also includes the sensationally popular essay “The Busy Trap,” as seen in the New York Times.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published June 12, 2012
About the author
Tim Kreider
10 books406 followersTim Kreider is an essayist and cartoonist. His comic "The Pain--When Will It End?" ran in the Baltimore City Paper for 12 years and was collected in three books by Fantagraphics. His first collection of essays, "We Learn Nothing," was published by Free Press in 2012. He has written for The New York Times, The Men's Journal, Nerve.com, The Comics Journal, and Film Quarterly. He is at work on a new collection for Simon & Schuster, "I Wrote This Book Because I Love You." He lives in an Undisclosed Location on the Chesapeake Bay.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 621 reviews
November 26, 2012
Fabulously irreverent...
“Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master."
“Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master."
June 24, 2012
I was asking myself, Who is Tim Kreider, and why did I order this book? Then I read the beginning of the first essay, "Reprieve": "Fourteen years ago, I was stabbed in the throat. This is kind of a long story and less interesting than it sounds. . . . After my unsuccessful murder I wasn't unhappy for an entire year."
And I thought, Oh yeah, THIS guy!
Here is what else Mr. Kreider had to say in essays about politics, friendship, "outrage porn," human fallibility, and discovering in his early 40s that he had two half-sisters:
"What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people."
"We have irreconcilable visions of the kind of country we want this to be: some of us would just like to live in Canada with better weather; others want something more like Iran with Jesus."
About his high-achieving father: "If there were such a diagnosis as unipolar mania I'd almost wonder whether he'd had it."
About his wastrel uncle: "His visits were like a whiff of cigarette smoke in church."
"I tend to think that anyone who conforms too closely to his or her assigned gender role must not be all that independent-minded or brave."
"My policy has always been, when someone asks you if you will travel to Wisconsin to nurse them through sex change surgery, to say yes."
"Hospital stays are one of the few times in adulthood when we have an excuse to drop all the busywork that normally preoccupies us and go to be with the people we love."
"What people want, above all else, is not to be happy; they want to devote themselves to something, to give themselves away."
"In 1996 I rode the Ringling Brothers circus train to Mexico City, where I lived for a month, pretending to be someone's husband."
This book also taught me legal jargon such as detour and frolic, cultural jargon such as Chinese hell money, and psychological jargon such as floridly psychotic.
And I thought, Oh yeah, THIS guy!
Here is what else Mr. Kreider had to say in essays about politics, friendship, "outrage porn," human fallibility, and discovering in his early 40s that he had two half-sisters:
"What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people."
"We have irreconcilable visions of the kind of country we want this to be: some of us would just like to live in Canada with better weather; others want something more like Iran with Jesus."
About his high-achieving father: "If there were such a diagnosis as unipolar mania I'd almost wonder whether he'd had it."
About his wastrel uncle: "His visits were like a whiff of cigarette smoke in church."
"I tend to think that anyone who conforms too closely to his or her assigned gender role must not be all that independent-minded or brave."
"My policy has always been, when someone asks you if you will travel to Wisconsin to nurse them through sex change surgery, to say yes."
"Hospital stays are one of the few times in adulthood when we have an excuse to drop all the busywork that normally preoccupies us and go to be with the people we love."
"What people want, above all else, is not to be happy; they want to devote themselves to something, to give themselves away."
"In 1996 I rode the Ringling Brothers circus train to Mexico City, where I lived for a month, pretending to be someone's husband."
This book also taught me legal jargon such as detour and frolic, cultural jargon such as Chinese hell money, and psychological jargon such as floridly psychotic.
March 19, 2013
Hit or miss. So juvenile in spots - a forty-something trapped at the maturity of twelve, or maybe sixteen - and yet insightful in others. Give it a go if you're prepared to give up on the essays that drag?
[3.5 stars, but mostly because I'll be thinking about bits and pieces of his writing for a long time.]
[3.5 stars, but mostly because I'll be thinking about bits and pieces of his writing for a long time.]
December 29, 2013
Some of these were really good: interesting and thought-provoking and discussion-inducing. Some of them were immature and uninteresting, and read like weak arguments made by a seemingly insecure man.
[Three stars for thoughtful insights amidst shallow word fights.]
[Three stars for thoughtful insights amidst shallow word fights.]
September 25, 2015
Though it was uneven at times, I am not sure how it is possible to not love a book in which a sentence begins "German humorist Friedrich Nietzsche..."
This happens on the second page of "An Insult To the Brain," the essay I most appreciated in this collection. It's an address of time spent with his mother in the hospital while she recovers from a serious illness. He goes to see her with Tristam Shandy in his bag because he's been trying (and failing) to read it. He decides to read it out loud to his mother because it seems like a livelier choice than "War and Peace." (At least according to aforementioned German humorist). His description of the novel and the visit interconnect with reflections on life, illness, family, love, and it comes together powerfully at the end. All of his essays are full of great anecdotes and observations, but this one was a bit less self-conscious and just kind of rose to an literary essay territory all its own.
But he had me from the start and I stuck with the book. From the first essay, "Reprieve," about an event that might have been life changing-- he got stabbed in the throat and almost died-- but doesn't save him from mundane-landia. He likens the experience to getting struck by lightning. He was freaked out, glad to be alive, lived in a somewhat altered state for a stretch of time. "But before a year had gone by, the same everyday anxieties and frustrations began creeping back. I was disgusted to catch myself yelling in traffic, pounding on my computer, lying awake at night worrying about what was to become of me."
In a way this book is about the transcendent mundane and the mundane transcendent. Every day things that feel rich and resonant, and over-the-top things which offer very little to a person who must still live in the questionable and often unglamorous details of the every day.
His cartoons are exquisite. I especially enjoyed the last one. "I'm from the future, asshole."
"Escape from Pony Island" about a friend of his who went off the rails with an oil-shortage apocalypse theory (with a lot of good points related to the bleakness of our collective future, but so busy making them he failed to remain a socially tolerable presence in the lives of his comrades), has perhaps the best title, but was the essay that least interested me, though I loved moments of it.
I really enjoyed "Bad People," about a troubled uncle, though it's a sad tale. Maybe it's just because it happened to be Delaware, but I found these lines particularly tragicomic and resonant: "At my uncle's bail hearing, the deputy attorney general called him 'a shiftless individual with no local ties and a tendency to violate parole and probation provisions." In a letter my uncle protested, 'I believe Someone [...] Should Point Out How Diligently I Was Working Toward Becoming A Well Respected Citizen Of Delaware." As a whole, the essay is a meditation on mental illness, family responsibility, the question of help that helps and help that's like spitting a sunflower shell into the grand canyon. And also, in its exploration of family dynamics, it reveals a lot about his father. "My father and my uncle Lee were like two brothers in a fairy tale-- much alike, one light, one dark. The overachiever and the fuck-up. The favorite and the disgrace. My father, Walter, is what you might call high-functioning, hypercompetent, a man who always seemed to have two or three appointments scheduled at once. If there was such a diagnosis as unipolar mania, I'd almost wonder whether he'd had it."
His essay about his friend Jennifer Boylan had some great moments, but I also found it frustrating at times. It probably didn't help that he used incorrect pronouns for half the essay, to make a point, that could have been made in a more graceful way. There were hints of immaturity and unfinishedness in here. As if he didn't have enough distance yet to write with the thoughtfulness that characterizes a lot of his work. Also it was a bit upsetting that he used the word transgendered fourteen times (I didn't really count.) It's TRANSGENDER. I don't understand how the editor let that one go.
I definitely recommend this book and look forward to reading more of his work.
This happens on the second page of "An Insult To the Brain," the essay I most appreciated in this collection. It's an address of time spent with his mother in the hospital while she recovers from a serious illness. He goes to see her with Tristam Shandy in his bag because he's been trying (and failing) to read it. He decides to read it out loud to his mother because it seems like a livelier choice than "War and Peace." (At least according to aforementioned German humorist). His description of the novel and the visit interconnect with reflections on life, illness, family, love, and it comes together powerfully at the end. All of his essays are full of great anecdotes and observations, but this one was a bit less self-conscious and just kind of rose to an literary essay territory all its own.
But he had me from the start and I stuck with the book. From the first essay, "Reprieve," about an event that might have been life changing-- he got stabbed in the throat and almost died-- but doesn't save him from mundane-landia. He likens the experience to getting struck by lightning. He was freaked out, glad to be alive, lived in a somewhat altered state for a stretch of time. "But before a year had gone by, the same everyday anxieties and frustrations began creeping back. I was disgusted to catch myself yelling in traffic, pounding on my computer, lying awake at night worrying about what was to become of me."
In a way this book is about the transcendent mundane and the mundane transcendent. Every day things that feel rich and resonant, and over-the-top things which offer very little to a person who must still live in the questionable and often unglamorous details of the every day.
His cartoons are exquisite. I especially enjoyed the last one. "I'm from the future, asshole."
"Escape from Pony Island" about a friend of his who went off the rails with an oil-shortage apocalypse theory (with a lot of good points related to the bleakness of our collective future, but so busy making them he failed to remain a socially tolerable presence in the lives of his comrades), has perhaps the best title, but was the essay that least interested me, though I loved moments of it.
I really enjoyed "Bad People," about a troubled uncle, though it's a sad tale. Maybe it's just because it happened to be Delaware, but I found these lines particularly tragicomic and resonant: "At my uncle's bail hearing, the deputy attorney general called him 'a shiftless individual with no local ties and a tendency to violate parole and probation provisions." In a letter my uncle protested, 'I believe Someone [...] Should Point Out How Diligently I Was Working Toward Becoming A Well Respected Citizen Of Delaware." As a whole, the essay is a meditation on mental illness, family responsibility, the question of help that helps and help that's like spitting a sunflower shell into the grand canyon. And also, in its exploration of family dynamics, it reveals a lot about his father. "My father and my uncle Lee were like two brothers in a fairy tale-- much alike, one light, one dark. The overachiever and the fuck-up. The favorite and the disgrace. My father, Walter, is what you might call high-functioning, hypercompetent, a man who always seemed to have two or three appointments scheduled at once. If there was such a diagnosis as unipolar mania, I'd almost wonder whether he'd had it."
His essay about his friend Jennifer Boylan had some great moments, but I also found it frustrating at times. It probably didn't help that he used incorrect pronouns for half the essay, to make a point, that could have been made in a more graceful way. There were hints of immaturity and unfinishedness in here. As if he didn't have enough distance yet to write with the thoughtfulness that characterizes a lot of his work. Also it was a bit upsetting that he used the word transgendered fourteen times (I didn't really count.) It's TRANSGENDER. I don't understand how the editor let that one go.
I definitely recommend this book and look forward to reading more of his work.
July 3, 2012
Tim Kreider spent years (decades) as a barroom philosopher. He has come out on the other side as something of a barstool sage. The debauchery and fecklessness is still there, but it is tempered with wisdom and a touch of weariness. I inadvertently conjured images of Denholm Elliott in Scorchers. Kreider has reached a place where he has learned something, despite the title, and wants to share his truths. He knows that they may not be your truths, but this was hard-earned wisdom and he wants to impart it.
Kreider has had the joy and burden of extensive personal freedoms and lacked many of the boundaries that define “regular society.” This has fueled him creativity as an artist. From the essays it also sounds as if the lack of boundaries have driven him to no man’s lands from time to time. The recognition that the greatest, most inescapable boundary looms closer as we get older seems to have given him focus and insight.
This collection starts with an account of Kreider’s stabbing, but sets the tone of the book by saying, “You’d like to think that nearly getting killed would be a permanently life-altering experience, but in truth it was less painful, and occasioned less serious reflection, than certain break-ups I’ve gone through.” Essays discuss his impassioned and tortuous love-life, excessive drinking, relationships with friends that seem more complicated than his relationships with women, forcing himself to view the Right as more than 2-dimensional caricatures, and the peaks and valleys of family. I particularly enjoyed “An Insult to the Brain,” an essay that intersected Tristam Shandy and his mother’s illness and “Chutes and Candyland,” which described his support of a close friend and mentor’s gender transition, causing him to reassess gender bias he didn’t know he had.
As a series of essays, We Learn Nothing is surprisingly tight and the disparate themes actually knit together forming a cohesive collection. For those of us who read The Pain in Baltimore’s City Paper and in mini-comic form, the essays offer critical commentary and analytic study of his earlier cartoons, sometimes stopping to describe the figurative car wrecks that led to their creation. Recommended.
Kreider has had the joy and burden of extensive personal freedoms and lacked many of the boundaries that define “regular society.” This has fueled him creativity as an artist. From the essays it also sounds as if the lack of boundaries have driven him to no man’s lands from time to time. The recognition that the greatest, most inescapable boundary looms closer as we get older seems to have given him focus and insight.
This collection starts with an account of Kreider’s stabbing, but sets the tone of the book by saying, “You’d like to think that nearly getting killed would be a permanently life-altering experience, but in truth it was less painful, and occasioned less serious reflection, than certain break-ups I’ve gone through.” Essays discuss his impassioned and tortuous love-life, excessive drinking, relationships with friends that seem more complicated than his relationships with women, forcing himself to view the Right as more than 2-dimensional caricatures, and the peaks and valleys of family. I particularly enjoyed “An Insult to the Brain,” an essay that intersected Tristam Shandy and his mother’s illness and “Chutes and Candyland,” which described his support of a close friend and mentor’s gender transition, causing him to reassess gender bias he didn’t know he had.
As a series of essays, We Learn Nothing is surprisingly tight and the disparate themes actually knit together forming a cohesive collection. For those of us who read The Pain in Baltimore’s City Paper and in mini-comic form, the essays offer critical commentary and analytic study of his earlier cartoons, sometimes stopping to describe the figurative car wrecks that led to their creation. Recommended.
April 13, 2018
Tim Kreider seems kind of like that charming ass we all know, the one who uses only the barest minimum of the fantastic potential he has been given, who I assume goes about his life crashing on the couches of a motley group of dear friends, perpetually moving between hungover and blotto, smirking, making mischief and nonsense, engendering endearment and headscratches from all who know him. I think I would really like Tim Kreider.
I really only stumbled upon him because of this NYT op-ed about the inevitability of Millennials replacing the current determined stagnancy with indignant energy. I liked the style of argument and the measures it took to qualify its approach and bias, the subtle humor peppered throughout.
This book is a collection of essays, and it benefits from the same qualities. Kreider starts off with a lot of stories whose gist is basically: I'm a difficult person, I have issues in interpersonal relationships; witness my quirks and sympathize with my unreasonable interpretations of things! They were funny in a pretty unique way, but not laugh-out-loud funny. Just "smirk" funny. But I think what really sets this collection--and Kreider's writing--apart is how genuine and perceptive he is. He has really eloquent and tender thoughts on friendship, family, and deportment that I really enjoyed reading, and certainly related to. And far from being cheapened by the smirks that haunt the rest of his works, I think they are rather buttressed by them--the tender expression of compassion and vulnerability is that much more genuine when expressed by a jaundiced misanthrope with a dash of slightly addled joie de vivre.
Hooray for Tim Kreider! Give him a read!
I really only stumbled upon him because of this NYT op-ed about the inevitability of Millennials replacing the current determined stagnancy with indignant energy. I liked the style of argument and the measures it took to qualify its approach and bias, the subtle humor peppered throughout.
This book is a collection of essays, and it benefits from the same qualities. Kreider starts off with a lot of stories whose gist is basically: I'm a difficult person, I have issues in interpersonal relationships; witness my quirks and sympathize with my unreasonable interpretations of things! They were funny in a pretty unique way, but not laugh-out-loud funny. Just "smirk" funny. But I think what really sets this collection--and Kreider's writing--apart is how genuine and perceptive he is. He has really eloquent and tender thoughts on friendship, family, and deportment that I really enjoyed reading, and certainly related to. And far from being cheapened by the smirks that haunt the rest of his works, I think they are rather buttressed by them--the tender expression of compassion and vulnerability is that much more genuine when expressed by a jaundiced misanthrope with a dash of slightly addled joie de vivre.
Hooray for Tim Kreider! Give him a read!
February 3, 2013
"Fourteen years ago, I was stabbed in the throat. This is kind of a long story and less interesting than it sounds....After my unsuccessful murder I wasn't unhappy for an entire year."
This first essay, Reprieve, is a short reflection on how his outlook on life changed afterward. His first year was a feeling of euphoric escape from death, but this becomes submerged by the everydayness of life. That one was my favourite.
Family relationships, friendships with current friends, defriended friends, lost friends, a transgendered friend are examined closely and at times with painful honesty. Others are more political. In "When They're Not Assholes" he tries to counter his instinctive acerbic dislike of the Tea Partiers by deciding to 'just listen'. But "What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people." Oh yes, exactly!
These are funny and often touching stories -- I think that his intelligent humour is what helps him to learn everything, including that sometimes he learns nothing.
This first essay, Reprieve, is a short reflection on how his outlook on life changed afterward. His first year was a feeling of euphoric escape from death, but this becomes submerged by the everydayness of life. That one was my favourite.
Family relationships, friendships with current friends, defriended friends, lost friends, a transgendered friend are examined closely and at times with painful honesty. Others are more political. In "When They're Not Assholes" he tries to counter his instinctive acerbic dislike of the Tea Partiers by deciding to 'just listen'. But "What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people." Oh yes, exactly!
These are funny and often touching stories -- I think that his intelligent humour is what helps him to learn everything, including that sometimes he learns nothing.
August 6, 2012
I found Tim Kreider through his NY Times essay on busyness, which was just perfect. I did a little digging around the web, found his cartoons, and thought: "Oh, Wow. This guy is way to the left of me politically. And he seems rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth angry, to boot." I almost didn't buy the book, expecting a screed. And yet, that essay . . .
So I took the plunge and I'm so glad I did. The essays are funny and sad at the same time, and in the best way possible. Many of them have to deal with the ways people move in and out of our lives, and how the author negotiates those painful transitions. The writing is beautiful and the cartoons have a sly sensibility that I love. Of course, for me, the best cartoon was the Owl-and-Bear doodle at the end of the Anti-Kreider club chapter. That KILLED me. Seriously, I teared up!
Just read it!
So I took the plunge and I'm so glad I did. The essays are funny and sad at the same time, and in the best way possible. Many of them have to deal with the ways people move in and out of our lives, and how the author negotiates those painful transitions. The writing is beautiful and the cartoons have a sly sensibility that I love. Of course, for me, the best cartoon was the Owl-and-Bear doodle at the end of the Anti-Kreider club chapter. That KILLED me. Seriously, I teared up!
Just read it!
June 10, 2024
Life is too short to be busy, but just long enough to read this wonderfully insightful book.
December 31, 2012
Sister Nancy gave me a copy of Nancy Pearl's review along with this book for Christmas. The review sounded so good that although I was still mid-Plutocrats I thought I'd read one of these essays and then get back to my "real" reading.
I read it straight through.
The joy of this book is, in part, that the topics into which Kreider delves are largely mundane and easy to relate to. He takes events and experiences which are remarkable (like being stabbed in the neck, meeting his half-sisters when he was 40, and supporting a good friend through a sex-change operation) and uses them to muse about universal themes; the nature of family, happiness, friendship.
Although I couldn't really relate to most of his experiences or friends, he captured the 'big picture' themes in a way that completely drew me in and had me chuckling at finding myself, my thoughts, feelings, and foibles reflected in those themes.
His writing is at once both deeply personal and extremely welcoming. I highly recommend it.
I read it straight through.
The joy of this book is, in part, that the topics into which Kreider delves are largely mundane and easy to relate to. He takes events and experiences which are remarkable (like being stabbed in the neck, meeting his half-sisters when he was 40, and supporting a good friend through a sex-change operation) and uses them to muse about universal themes; the nature of family, happiness, friendship.
Although I couldn't really relate to most of his experiences or friends, he captured the 'big picture' themes in a way that completely drew me in and had me chuckling at finding myself, my thoughts, feelings, and foibles reflected in those themes.
His writing is at once both deeply personal and extremely welcoming. I highly recommend it.
September 4, 2019
I can’t remember where exactly I knew about this book. I think someone mentioned it in an article but I am not sure. I am just grateful that this book found its way to me.
The book is a collection of essays talking about a number of mundane topics you think you have read everything that’s ever written about them. How wrong you would be. I felt sad reading about friendship and we all now what a positively happy topic friendship is.
It is the kind of books that one can’t simply be finished with. You read it once for content, then you read countless other times to mend your heart. Not because it offers you some priceless wisdom but because it is beautiful and insightful. Reading the book feels like two strangers discussing how wistfully painful it is to be a person in the world.
The book is simply brilliant!
The book is a collection of essays talking about a number of mundane topics you think you have read everything that’s ever written about them. How wrong you would be. I felt sad reading about friendship and we all now what a positively happy topic friendship is.
It is the kind of books that one can’t simply be finished with. You read it once for content, then you read countless other times to mend your heart. Not because it offers you some priceless wisdom but because it is beautiful and insightful. Reading the book feels like two strangers discussing how wistfully painful it is to be a person in the world.
The book is simply brilliant!
November 21, 2021
I just discovered Kreider's writing and I read all his books all at once because he is an excellent writer that is not trying too hard to show us his writers training and chops but who actually uses his skillful prose to tell funny, heartwarming and insightful stories.
March 3, 2019
3.5 stars
This is a perfectly respectable essay collection; I bounced off of it when trying to read it straight through, but when I started skipping around reading whatever appealed most at the moment, I wound up enjoying it. Kreider has a lot of thoughts about life, family, friends, lies people tell themselves, and what’s really important, and shares them through a series of thoughtful and well-written (if slightly wordy) personal essays. Standouts for me were “Sister World” (in which Kreider, an adoptee, meets his biological family for the first time as an adult and bonds with his newfound sisters), “Chutes and Candyland” (about a friend who came out as transgender in middle age, and Kreider’s struggle to accept as a woman someone he’d only known as a man; the friend is Jennifer Finney Boylan and I look forward to reading her own book), and “The Anti-Kreider Club” (about the weird lack of fanfare around the end of friendships: one person stops speaking to the other, who isn’t supposed to seek answers or acknowledge this at all).
Overall not a groundbreaking collection, but a worthwhile one. One of these essays, “The Czar’s Daughter,” has also appeared in modified form in a Radiolab story, which you can listen to here. In its melancholy and generosity, its portrayal of deep and meaningful connections between essentially lonely people, it’s a fair representation of the collection.
This is a perfectly respectable essay collection; I bounced off of it when trying to read it straight through, but when I started skipping around reading whatever appealed most at the moment, I wound up enjoying it. Kreider has a lot of thoughts about life, family, friends, lies people tell themselves, and what’s really important, and shares them through a series of thoughtful and well-written (if slightly wordy) personal essays. Standouts for me were “Sister World” (in which Kreider, an adoptee, meets his biological family for the first time as an adult and bonds with his newfound sisters), “Chutes and Candyland” (about a friend who came out as transgender in middle age, and Kreider’s struggle to accept as a woman someone he’d only known as a man; the friend is Jennifer Finney Boylan and I look forward to reading her own book), and “The Anti-Kreider Club” (about the weird lack of fanfare around the end of friendships: one person stops speaking to the other, who isn’t supposed to seek answers or acknowledge this at all).
Overall not a groundbreaking collection, but a worthwhile one. One of these essays, “The Czar’s Daughter,” has also appeared in modified form in a Radiolab story, which you can listen to here. In its melancholy and generosity, its portrayal of deep and meaningful connections between essentially lonely people, it’s a fair representation of the collection.
March 22, 2013
This is a collection of personal essays and cartoons by NY Times columnist Tim Kreider. I really loved this book and not just for its use of em dashes and colons. I thought Kreider was completely unique, profound, darkly funny, and incisive. It is the only book for a long time where I have read passages to my husband. It isn't for everyone, but I'm pretty sure that if I met Kreider in person, I would follow him around like a groupie, which would really bug and fascinate him at the same time.
Here are some of my favorite passages from this book:
From The Czar's Daughter:
"Years ago a friend of mine and I used to frequent a market in Baltimore where we would eat oysters and drink Very Large Beers from 32-ounce Styrofoam cups. One of the regulars there had the worst toupee in the world, a comical little wig taped in place on the top of his head. Looking at this man and drinking our VLBs, we developed the concept of the Soul Toupee. Each of us has a Soul Toupee. The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us. Contemplating one's own Soul Toupee is not an exercise for the fainthearted. Most of the time other people don't even get why our Soul Toupee is any big deal or a cause of such evident deep shame to us but they can tell that it is because of our inept, transparent efforts to cover it up, which only call more attention to it and to our self-consciousness about it, and so they gently pretend not to notice it. Meanwhile we're standing there with our little rigid spongelike square of hair pasted on our heads thinking: Heh -- got'em all fooled!"
From Escape from Pony Island:
And yet whenever such a person appears in real life, our reflex is to join in with the mobs of scoffers and call them alarmists, hysterics, conspiracy freaks, and doomsayers. Nietzsche wrote, "One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic." Or, as The Dude put it: "You're not wrong, Walter - you're just an asshole."
From The Referendum:
One of the hardest things to look at is the life we didn't lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back - Lot's wife, Eurydice - are irrevocably lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield. It's the closest we can get to a glimpse of the parallel universe in which we didn't ruin the relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or made that plan at the last minute. So it's tempting to read other people's lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own, to covet or denigrate them instead of seeing them for what they are: other people's lives, island universes, unknowable.
From You Can't Stay Here:
We couldn't go on living like that forever; as the traditional last call has it: "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here." One by one my old drinking buddies succumbed to the usual tragedies: careers, marriages, mortgages, children. And as my own metabolism started to slow, the fun:hangover ratio became increasingly unacceptable. Eventually a day comes when the lined, puffy, sagging face you see [in] the mirror when you're hung over does not go away, and you realize that it is now your actual face. The hangovers also acquired a dreadful new symptom of existential anxiety in addition to their more traditional attributes. Self-inflicted brain damage no longer seems so cool and defiant, nor wasting time so liberating. Squandering time is a luxury of profligate youth, when the years are to us as dollars are to billionaires. Doing the same thing in middle age just makes you nervous, not with vague puritan guilt but the more urgent worry that you're running out of time, a deadline you can feel in your cells.
From Averted Vision:
Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that any deliberate campaign to achieve it is misguided, is that it isn't an obtainable goal in itself but only an aftereffect. It's the consequence of having lived in the way that we're supposed to - by which I don't mean ethically correctly but fully, consciously engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomenon familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it's also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the real stars, those blinding cataclysms in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past.
Here are some of my favorite passages from this book:
From The Czar's Daughter:
"Years ago a friend of mine and I used to frequent a market in Baltimore where we would eat oysters and drink Very Large Beers from 32-ounce Styrofoam cups. One of the regulars there had the worst toupee in the world, a comical little wig taped in place on the top of his head. Looking at this man and drinking our VLBs, we developed the concept of the Soul Toupee. Each of us has a Soul Toupee. The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us. Contemplating one's own Soul Toupee is not an exercise for the fainthearted. Most of the time other people don't even get why our Soul Toupee is any big deal or a cause of such evident deep shame to us but they can tell that it is because of our inept, transparent efforts to cover it up, which only call more attention to it and to our self-consciousness about it, and so they gently pretend not to notice it. Meanwhile we're standing there with our little rigid spongelike square of hair pasted on our heads thinking: Heh -- got'em all fooled!"
From Escape from Pony Island:
And yet whenever such a person appears in real life, our reflex is to join in with the mobs of scoffers and call them alarmists, hysterics, conspiracy freaks, and doomsayers. Nietzsche wrote, "One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic." Or, as The Dude put it: "You're not wrong, Walter - you're just an asshole."
From The Referendum:
One of the hardest things to look at is the life we didn't lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back - Lot's wife, Eurydice - are irrevocably lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield. It's the closest we can get to a glimpse of the parallel universe in which we didn't ruin the relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or made that plan at the last minute. So it's tempting to read other people's lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own, to covet or denigrate them instead of seeing them for what they are: other people's lives, island universes, unknowable.
From You Can't Stay Here:
We couldn't go on living like that forever; as the traditional last call has it: "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here." One by one my old drinking buddies succumbed to the usual tragedies: careers, marriages, mortgages, children. And as my own metabolism started to slow, the fun:hangover ratio became increasingly unacceptable. Eventually a day comes when the lined, puffy, sagging face you see [in] the mirror when you're hung over does not go away, and you realize that it is now your actual face. The hangovers also acquired a dreadful new symptom of existential anxiety in addition to their more traditional attributes. Self-inflicted brain damage no longer seems so cool and defiant, nor wasting time so liberating. Squandering time is a luxury of profligate youth, when the years are to us as dollars are to billionaires. Doing the same thing in middle age just makes you nervous, not with vague puritan guilt but the more urgent worry that you're running out of time, a deadline you can feel in your cells.
From Averted Vision:
Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that any deliberate campaign to achieve it is misguided, is that it isn't an obtainable goal in itself but only an aftereffect. It's the consequence of having lived in the way that we're supposed to - by which I don't mean ethically correctly but fully, consciously engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomenon familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it's also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the real stars, those blinding cataclysms in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past.
January 18, 2018
https://msarki.tumblr.com/post/169844...
Tim Kreider’s latest book, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays, was my first introduction to him. I had never consciously seen the cartoons he was previously well-known for or even remotely interested in cartoons anyway. That title at first sounded silly to me but I went ahead and read the book for review based on David Foster Wallace’s blurb that “Kreider Rules!” I have considered Wallace one of my favorite essayists and decided I would be thrilled if Kreider measured up even minimally to what David Foster Wallace had achieved with the likes of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments.
I Wrote This Book Because I Love You was so very good. And after having my socks knocked off by Kreider’s writing I decided to read everything he had produced, and We Learn Nothing became next on my list. I purchased a paperback copy of the book as my experience has proven that photographs (and I thus assumed cartoons) do not lend themselves to projecting their best foot forward as presented in digital book form. And through my reading of We Learn Nothing I found myself enjoying the occasional cartoon dispersed between essays which afforded me the impetus to further purchase his first three collections of his most notable cartoons.
Kreider’s evolution as an essayist is remarkable in the evidence produced on the pages of this book. Though not as perfect as his latest effort, these essays are nonetheless strong examples of his honesty on the page. Not only is Kreider interesting but he has deeply thought out whatever he cares enough to write about. I too believe that Kreider rules, and he is obviously also one cool dude.
Tim Kreider’s latest book, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays, was my first introduction to him. I had never consciously seen the cartoons he was previously well-known for or even remotely interested in cartoons anyway. That title at first sounded silly to me but I went ahead and read the book for review based on David Foster Wallace’s blurb that “Kreider Rules!” I have considered Wallace one of my favorite essayists and decided I would be thrilled if Kreider measured up even minimally to what David Foster Wallace had achieved with the likes of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments.
I Wrote This Book Because I Love You was so very good. And after having my socks knocked off by Kreider’s writing I decided to read everything he had produced, and We Learn Nothing became next on my list. I purchased a paperback copy of the book as my experience has proven that photographs (and I thus assumed cartoons) do not lend themselves to projecting their best foot forward as presented in digital book form. And through my reading of We Learn Nothing I found myself enjoying the occasional cartoon dispersed between essays which afforded me the impetus to further purchase his first three collections of his most notable cartoons.
Kreider’s evolution as an essayist is remarkable in the evidence produced on the pages of this book. Though not as perfect as his latest effort, these essays are nonetheless strong examples of his honesty on the page. Not only is Kreider interesting but he has deeply thought out whatever he cares enough to write about. I too believe that Kreider rules, and he is obviously also one cool dude.
February 19, 2024
Pure genius. A manifesto on how to live. Written with such poignant whit, but never overly cynical. Made me cry and laugh uncontrollably on numerous occasions. 5 stars. This passage was particularly moving…
“We Mistakenly imagine we want happiness, which we tend do picture in vague, soft-focus terms, when what we really crave is the harder edged quality of intensity. We’ve all known (or been) people who returned again and again to relationships that seemed to make them miserable. Quite a few soldiers can’t get used to the lowered stakes of civilian life, and reenlist. We want to be hurt, astonished, reminded we are alive”.
“We Mistakenly imagine we want happiness, which we tend do picture in vague, soft-focus terms, when what we really crave is the harder edged quality of intensity. We’ve all known (or been) people who returned again and again to relationships that seemed to make them miserable. Quite a few soldiers can’t get used to the lowered stakes of civilian life, and reenlist. We want to be hurt, astonished, reminded we are alive”.
January 17, 2022
Books of essays are problematic for me, because I so prefer narrative and stories, and plot developments over time. And I can't respond equally to each essay...some just leave me cold. So, for some of this book, I fought. I dawdled.
But it seemed to get stronger as it progressed. While some essays are snarky profiles of (ex?) friends with all their funny quirks, and Kreider's powers of observation are on display, I much prefer the quieter, more introspective, pieces...Reading Tristam Shandy with his mother, discovering his birth family, including two half sisters. They touched my heart.
The profile about Jenny Boylan connected back to reading her memoir of her transition from Jim. And her friend, and a favorite author, Richard Russo. This essay is really more about Kreider deciding to start concentrating on 'what is a friend' instead of the strangeness of a male friend becoming a female friend. Lots of deep honesty here.
While I may have approached this book as more of a chore than a pleasure, it was definitely a rewarding read.
But it seemed to get stronger as it progressed. While some essays are snarky profiles of (ex?) friends with all their funny quirks, and Kreider's powers of observation are on display, I much prefer the quieter, more introspective, pieces...Reading Tristam Shandy with his mother, discovering his birth family, including two half sisters. They touched my heart.
The profile about Jenny Boylan connected back to reading her memoir of her transition from Jim. And her friend, and a favorite author, Richard Russo. This essay is really more about Kreider deciding to start concentrating on 'what is a friend' instead of the strangeness of a male friend becoming a female friend. Lots of deep honesty here.
While I may have approached this book as more of a chore than a pleasure, it was definitely a rewarding read.
July 22, 2024
I’m intimidated by trying to write a review for a book that since I first read it in 2015, I’ve considered my favorite. I’ve since read or listened to it countless times and gifted to others on 4 different occasions. This collection of essays has become my comfort book.
It’s funny that despite listening to the audiobook numerous times and enjoying it so thoroughly over the years as soon as I’m tasked with putting into words what I like about it so much, the clarity of these ideas seems to evaporate. I could use Tim Kreider’s help with this as he is in my opinion the very best at putting into words the things that matter most.
With every revisit through these stories I find myself wanting to talk to the characters involved. I’d like to sit in a room of friends sharing stories of Skelly. I’d like to subject myself to a brief sermon from Ken about the irrefutable implications of peak oil. I’d like to sit at a bar overlooking the Chesapeake Bay drinking beers with Harold. And to ask them all how it felt for them to read these essays themselves. I would imagine in most cases, it felt “ireal”
Possibly this book’s greatest accomplishment is in how reflective it can make you about your own life. How Tim’s personal experience is somehow made relatable despite his life trajectory being wildly different from my own. It really didn’t hurt though that Tim’s politics largely mirror my own and having those shared beliefs validated by him so eloquently was a pleasure I won’t deny.
So what is it actually about? It’s a collection of stories that does its very best to address the most important things in life. Meaningful friendships, what it means to be family, passion and desire, indulgence and addiction, navigating change and eventually, unfortunately, death.
It’s funny that despite listening to the audiobook numerous times and enjoying it so thoroughly over the years as soon as I’m tasked with putting into words what I like about it so much, the clarity of these ideas seems to evaporate. I could use Tim Kreider’s help with this as he is in my opinion the very best at putting into words the things that matter most.
With every revisit through these stories I find myself wanting to talk to the characters involved. I’d like to sit in a room of friends sharing stories of Skelly. I’d like to subject myself to a brief sermon from Ken about the irrefutable implications of peak oil. I’d like to sit at a bar overlooking the Chesapeake Bay drinking beers with Harold. And to ask them all how it felt for them to read these essays themselves. I would imagine in most cases, it felt “ireal”
Possibly this book’s greatest accomplishment is in how reflective it can make you about your own life. How Tim’s personal experience is somehow made relatable despite his life trajectory being wildly different from my own. It really didn’t hurt though that Tim’s politics largely mirror my own and having those shared beliefs validated by him so eloquently was a pleasure I won’t deny.
So what is it actually about? It’s a collection of stories that does its very best to address the most important things in life. Meaningful friendships, what it means to be family, passion and desire, indulgence and addiction, navigating change and eventually, unfortunately, death.
December 30, 2020
one reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgment, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding.witty and sagacious, tim kreider's writing is always entertaining. full of humor, cruel truths, self-deprecation, and hard-won wisdom, his essays make you think, make you feel, and make you laugh inappropriately loud. we learn nothing collects 14 pieces, spanning a broad swath of subjects, but which are all, ultimately, about the very same thing: this messy business of being mortal. come for the laughs, stay for the life lessons.
i don't know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. we dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 a.m. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives.
September 30, 2014
After having stumbled upon cartoonist/essayist Tim Kreider's collection by chance, wandering down a random Amazon rabbit-hole, I'll be honest and say that it was the "Kreider rules" blurb left by DFW that made me buy it. He really does, though. While on the surface these essays seem like humorous bits of business, the world seen through the eyes of a forty-something problem drinker, single, childless, perhaps emotionally stunted, every one of them, in the end, reveals keen insight and a throbbing heart. This immediately earned a place in my top ten essay collections, with JJ Sullivan's Pulphead, and Tom Bissell's The Magic Hours, and Didion's The White Album, and my own personal DFW compilation I call Consider the Supposedly Fun Flesh, plus a spot reserved for D'Ambrosio's Loitering, due out this November.
May 16, 2019
This book is a kind of a personal narrative, autobiographical in some ways and philosophically inclined in others, but it's full of hilarious anecdotes from a self-proclaimed liberal – “a term used almost exclusively by conservatives, and is loosely synonymous with queerbait; progressives are what liberals call themselves now that liberal is a slur (it’s what developmentally delayed is to retarded); and as far as I can tell leftists are liberals who get mad if you call them liberals because liberals are the bourgeois patsies of The Man.” I grabbed it after reading one of Kreider’s op-eds in the NY Times. It’s hard to review a book when it speaks for itself, and so I selected a few of my favorite passages:
“I respect people who had to quit drinking lest it kill them, but those who never saw the appeal of the stuff in the first place seem not quite to be trusted” (p. 14).
“Years ago a friend of mine and I used to frequent a market in Baltimore where we would eat oysters and drink Very Large Beers from 32-ounce Styrofoam cups. One of regulars there had the worst toupee in the world, a comical little wig taped in place of the top of his head. Looking at this man and drinking our LVBs, we developed the concept of the Soul Toupee. Each of us has a Soul Toupee. The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us. Contemplating one’s own Soul Toupee is not an exercise for the fainthearted. Most of the time other people don’t even get why our Soul Toupee is any big deal or a cause of such evident deep shame to us but they can tell that is because of our inspect, transparent efforts to cover it up, which only call more attention to it and to our self-consciousness about it, and so they gently pretend not to notice it. Meanwhile we’re standing there with our little rigid spongelike square of hair pasted on our heads thinking: Heh—got ‘em all fooled!” (p. 40).
“I was a political cartoonist and essayist for the duration of the Bush presidency, so I was professionally furious every week for eight years” (p.49).
“Once I realized I enjoyed anger, I noticed how much time I spent experiencing it. If you’re anything like me, you spend about 87 percent of your mental life winning imaginary arguments that are never actually going to take place” (p. 50).
“One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgement, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding” (p. 55).
“Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people—if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are—you may have lost perspective” (p. 73).
“God agreed to spare Sodom if ten good men could be found within its walls (Abraham had to haggle him down from fifty). He ended up napalming those perverts anyway but the basic principle of sparing the sinner for the sake of the righteous, or the shithead for the sake of the basically okay, remains sound” (p. 73).
“[Anyone] who remembers the heartless economy of grade school knows how fiercely we covet the affection of those who disdain us” (p. 82).
“I used to refer to Ken as ‘the smartest person I know,” and I don’t think I’m the only person who ever called him that. As Michael Herr once wrote of Stanley Kubrick, “his elevator goes all the way to the roof�� (p. 94).
“Ken often said of himself that he was essentially libertarian in his outlook, but Harold and I suspect that, like many libertarians, he was an authoritarian at heart. (People are most vociferously opposed to those forces they have to resist more fiercely within themselves)” (p. 98).
“This was typical of Ken’s rhetorical strategy: a Socratic dialogue in which, as with the original Socrates, you are invited to offer your own opinion and quickly exposed as an ignoramus, whereupon he beings to explain the correct answer, putting forth whole systems of thought in long, well-organized paragraphs while you, relegated now to the role of the chastened flunky, occasionally relive his discourse with a dutiful ‘I do not know, Ken,’ or ‘Surely it must be so’ (p. 101).
“[Ken] knew so much more than me, about everything. But he never seemed to understand that exhausting someone in argument isn’t the same das convincing them” (p. 109).
“The constant external demands of frantic busyness provide a kind of existential reassurance” (p. 125).
“Parenthood opens up an even deeper divide. Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. It’s as if these people have joined a cult: they claim to be happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to the a papered sociopathic mater who’s every whim is law”
[…]
“But one reason my friends with children sometimes envy my [single] life, and I never envy theirs, is that they know what they’re missing, and I don’t. There are moments when some part of me wonders whether I am missing not only the whole biological point—since reproducing is, evolutionary speaking, the one simple job we’re supposed to accomplish while we're alive—but something else I cannot being to imagine, an entire dimension of human experience undetectable to my sense, like an inhabitant of Flatland scoffing at the theoretical notion of the sky” (p. 126, 127).
“One of the hardest things to look at is the life we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look—Lot’s wife, Eurydice—are irrevocably lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely married in his shield. It’s the closest we can get to a glimpse of the parallel universe in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got the job we applied for or made that plane at the last minute. So it’s tempting to read other’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own, to covet or denigrate them instead of seeing them for what they are: other people’s lives, island universes, unknowable” (p. 129).
“We’re all so eager, both in life and in art, to get past this bullshit to the next Good Part up ahead. Believe it or not […] this bullshit is the good part” (p. 185).
“I had always known I was adopted; it was the part of the answer to the Where-did-I-come-from question, but […] This is not wholly my own story to tell, so I’ll suffice it to say that my existence turns out to have been contingent on a number of people behaving with extraordinary decency in difficult circumstances. It was also, I feel obliged to mention, contingent on the fact that I was born six years before Roe v. Wade. This hasn’t changed my position on abortion, but it does make me feel like the beneficiary of some unfair historical loophole, like having missed out on the draft. It all made my life seem even more undeserved than it already did, as though the world were a private party I’d gotten to crash” (p. 194, 196).
“Meeting my [biological family] must have been, for them, like suddenly inheriting a llama ranch. On the hand: Llamas! Hey! Neat. On the other: So, uh, what exactly does one do with a llama, anyway?” (p. 201).
“Some parents had told me that you couldn’t understand what it meant to truly love someone until you’d had a child, which had always seemed to me like not a very impressive advertisement for human altruism—most people only ever experience selfless love toward people who were genetic extensions of themselves? But now here it was, a force as a matter-of-act and implacable as the gravity of the planet, the deceptively gentle pull of six thousand sextillion tons” (p. 205,206).
“Family is all about baggage—feuds and grudges and long-unspoken tensions, having fights and being forced to apologize, enduring each other’s unendearing foibles for decades. They are, like it nor not, the people who won’t go away” (p. 208).
“Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that any deliberate campaign to achieve it is so misguided, is that it isn’t an obtainable goal in itself but only aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to—by which I don’t mean ethically correctly but fully, consciously engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomenon familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it’s also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the real stars, those blinding cataclysms in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past” (p. 218).
“I respect people who had to quit drinking lest it kill them, but those who never saw the appeal of the stuff in the first place seem not quite to be trusted” (p. 14).
“Years ago a friend of mine and I used to frequent a market in Baltimore where we would eat oysters and drink Very Large Beers from 32-ounce Styrofoam cups. One of regulars there had the worst toupee in the world, a comical little wig taped in place of the top of his head. Looking at this man and drinking our LVBs, we developed the concept of the Soul Toupee. Each of us has a Soul Toupee. The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us. Contemplating one’s own Soul Toupee is not an exercise for the fainthearted. Most of the time other people don’t even get why our Soul Toupee is any big deal or a cause of such evident deep shame to us but they can tell that is because of our inspect, transparent efforts to cover it up, which only call more attention to it and to our self-consciousness about it, and so they gently pretend not to notice it. Meanwhile we’re standing there with our little rigid spongelike square of hair pasted on our heads thinking: Heh—got ‘em all fooled!” (p. 40).
“I was a political cartoonist and essayist for the duration of the Bush presidency, so I was professionally furious every week for eight years” (p.49).
“Once I realized I enjoyed anger, I noticed how much time I spent experiencing it. If you’re anything like me, you spend about 87 percent of your mental life winning imaginary arguments that are never actually going to take place” (p. 50).
“One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgement, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding” (p. 55).
“Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people—if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are—you may have lost perspective” (p. 73).
“God agreed to spare Sodom if ten good men could be found within its walls (Abraham had to haggle him down from fifty). He ended up napalming those perverts anyway but the basic principle of sparing the sinner for the sake of the righteous, or the shithead for the sake of the basically okay, remains sound” (p. 73).
“[Anyone] who remembers the heartless economy of grade school knows how fiercely we covet the affection of those who disdain us” (p. 82).
“I used to refer to Ken as ‘the smartest person I know,” and I don’t think I’m the only person who ever called him that. As Michael Herr once wrote of Stanley Kubrick, “his elevator goes all the way to the roof�� (p. 94).
“Ken often said of himself that he was essentially libertarian in his outlook, but Harold and I suspect that, like many libertarians, he was an authoritarian at heart. (People are most vociferously opposed to those forces they have to resist more fiercely within themselves)” (p. 98).
“This was typical of Ken’s rhetorical strategy: a Socratic dialogue in which, as with the original Socrates, you are invited to offer your own opinion and quickly exposed as an ignoramus, whereupon he beings to explain the correct answer, putting forth whole systems of thought in long, well-organized paragraphs while you, relegated now to the role of the chastened flunky, occasionally relive his discourse with a dutiful ‘I do not know, Ken,’ or ‘Surely it must be so’ (p. 101).
“[Ken] knew so much more than me, about everything. But he never seemed to understand that exhausting someone in argument isn’t the same das convincing them” (p. 109).
“The constant external demands of frantic busyness provide a kind of existential reassurance” (p. 125).
“Parenthood opens up an even deeper divide. Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. It’s as if these people have joined a cult: they claim to be happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to the a papered sociopathic mater who’s every whim is law”
[…]
“But one reason my friends with children sometimes envy my [single] life, and I never envy theirs, is that they know what they’re missing, and I don’t. There are moments when some part of me wonders whether I am missing not only the whole biological point—since reproducing is, evolutionary speaking, the one simple job we’re supposed to accomplish while we're alive—but something else I cannot being to imagine, an entire dimension of human experience undetectable to my sense, like an inhabitant of Flatland scoffing at the theoretical notion of the sky” (p. 126, 127).
“One of the hardest things to look at is the life we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look—Lot’s wife, Eurydice—are irrevocably lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely married in his shield. It’s the closest we can get to a glimpse of the parallel universe in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got the job we applied for or made that plane at the last minute. So it’s tempting to read other’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own, to covet or denigrate them instead of seeing them for what they are: other people’s lives, island universes, unknowable” (p. 129).
“We’re all so eager, both in life and in art, to get past this bullshit to the next Good Part up ahead. Believe it or not […] this bullshit is the good part” (p. 185).
“I had always known I was adopted; it was the part of the answer to the Where-did-I-come-from question, but […] This is not wholly my own story to tell, so I’ll suffice it to say that my existence turns out to have been contingent on a number of people behaving with extraordinary decency in difficult circumstances. It was also, I feel obliged to mention, contingent on the fact that I was born six years before Roe v. Wade. This hasn’t changed my position on abortion, but it does make me feel like the beneficiary of some unfair historical loophole, like having missed out on the draft. It all made my life seem even more undeserved than it already did, as though the world were a private party I’d gotten to crash” (p. 194, 196).
“Meeting my [biological family] must have been, for them, like suddenly inheriting a llama ranch. On the hand: Llamas! Hey! Neat. On the other: So, uh, what exactly does one do with a llama, anyway?” (p. 201).
“Some parents had told me that you couldn’t understand what it meant to truly love someone until you’d had a child, which had always seemed to me like not a very impressive advertisement for human altruism—most people only ever experience selfless love toward people who were genetic extensions of themselves? But now here it was, a force as a matter-of-act and implacable as the gravity of the planet, the deceptively gentle pull of six thousand sextillion tons” (p. 205,206).
“Family is all about baggage—feuds and grudges and long-unspoken tensions, having fights and being forced to apologize, enduring each other’s unendearing foibles for decades. They are, like it nor not, the people who won’t go away” (p. 208).
“Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that any deliberate campaign to achieve it is so misguided, is that it isn’t an obtainable goal in itself but only aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to—by which I don’t mean ethically correctly but fully, consciously engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomenon familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it’s also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the real stars, those blinding cataclysms in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past” (p. 218).
April 1, 2019
I read this because I was so taken with an older piece of his that got sort of meme-ified recently ("if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known") and overall, I really enjoyed it. He's a sharp, insightful writer with a lot of humor but also, in general, compassion.
However. This collection came out in 2012, and some of the essays collected within are older than that. And some of them have simply not aged well. There's plenty of George W. Bush humor that's not like "oh yeah...that guy did suck but now we have bigger problems lol". But then there is a lengthy essay, "Chutes and Candyland," about Kreider's friendship with the transgender author Jennifer Finney Boylan, and they are clearly close friends (Boylan asked Kreider to stay with her for 10 days immediately following her gender conformation surgery to help care for her), and the essay was clearly written with love and the best vocabulary available to Kreider at the time. (And received Boylan's blessing). But reading it now is very yikes and I have to imagine might be hurtful for a trans person to read.
Still, I'm eager to read more of his work, but I just wanted to highlight that concern!
However. This collection came out in 2012, and some of the essays collected within are older than that. And some of them have simply not aged well. There's plenty of George W. Bush humor that's not like "oh yeah...that guy did suck but now we have bigger problems lol". But then there is a lengthy essay, "Chutes and Candyland," about Kreider's friendship with the transgender author Jennifer Finney Boylan, and they are clearly close friends (Boylan asked Kreider to stay with her for 10 days immediately following her gender conformation surgery to help care for her), and the essay was clearly written with love and the best vocabulary available to Kreider at the time. (And received Boylan's blessing). But reading it now is very yikes and I have to imagine might be hurtful for a trans person to read.
Still, I'm eager to read more of his work, but I just wanted to highlight that concern!
July 14, 2020
Reading Kreider is a bit like reading a parallel universe version of David Foster Wallace, where DFW gives fewer fucks in general, writes more directly about his personal life, and uses words solely found in the dictionary. I guess what reminded me of DFW is the honesty, perceptivity, and ability to make the specific feel extremely universal. The writing often made me smirk and even sometimes laugh out loud and several times I had that similar-to- reading-DFW-sensation of 'hot damn, yes, you just perfectly described that complicated thing about being a person.'
March 29, 2021
We Learn Nothing es una colección de ensayos y caricaturas brutalmente honestos que te mantienen despierto a la 1 de la mañana, reflexionando sobre La Vida. Obligan a uno a hacerse una introspección (a momentos chistoso, a momentos incómodo). Explora auténticas preguntas existenciales: ¿Por qué nos enamoramos de personas que ni siquiera nos gustan? ¿Por qué sentimos la necesidad de tener que validar nuestras decisiones ante otros? ¿Por qué es más fácil terminar una relación amorosa que una relación entre amigos? ¿Por qué el enojo nos mueve más que la empatía?
Creo que es el primer autor que leo que se atreve a compartir sus opiniones así como son - sinceras, crudas. Con este libro, no vas leer lo que quieres escuchar, sino lo que probablemente no has escuchado antes. Elegí leer este libro en mi círculo de lectura y debo admitir que hasta ahora, es el libro que más ha suscitado discusión y diálogo.
“These are the conversations you have only with best friends or total strangers, late at night over drinks, near closing time”.
Creo que es el primer autor que leo que se atreve a compartir sus opiniones así como son - sinceras, crudas. Con este libro, no vas leer lo que quieres escuchar, sino lo que probablemente no has escuchado antes. Elegí leer este libro en mi círculo de lectura y debo admitir que hasta ahora, es el libro que más ha suscitado discusión y diálogo.
“These are the conversations you have only with best friends or total strangers, late at night over drinks, near closing time”.
July 12, 2024
This is the first book that whenever I finished it I immediately went back to re-read an earlier chapter. It's also the first book I've read in this kind of style, it's just a collection of personal essays from the author on different topics.
From how heartbreak changes people, to things like losing contact with a childhood friend and what history is lost there. It's poignant, funny and thoroughly engaging. Loved it
From how heartbreak changes people, to things like losing contact with a childhood friend and what history is lost there. It's poignant, funny and thoroughly engaging. Loved it
September 24, 2021
Ever since I came across Tim Kreider's excellent Atlantic article about the highs and lows of Covid quarantine, "I'm Not Scared to Reenter Society-I'm Just Not Sure I Want To" (May 30, 2021), I wanted to read more of his works. I really enjoyed this essay collection-wry, thoughtful, ironic, smart, and self-deprecating.
March 7, 2020
Funny. Insightful. A little depressing. As a midwestern housewife, I don’t have a lot in common with an older single man from the east coast who can’t seem to decide if he’s proud of his life choices (and all the stories they’ve produced) or beginning to regret the road to loneliness he’s paved. I enjoyed bits but realized I wasn’t the audience most of the time.
Read
May 23, 2022funny and clever and i like the attitudes in it. definitely white man comedy perspective but i still like and want to take things away from
August 3, 2013
Do you have one of those books where just from reading the first few lines, you decide to buy the book. Where after a few pages, you know you’ll read it a second time. Where halfway through, you fall in love with it. Where you become desperate for it not to end, and even before it does, you vow to recommend it to everyone you know?
We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider is that book for me.
Whenever I tell my well-read friend S, who studied Lit and is the most bookish person I know, that I don’t read too good, she would say that I read differently. “You read a lot of articles," she’d state. It’s true. I tend to read more op-ed pieces, commentary and feature writing than I do books. It’s partly why We Learn Nothing appeals greatly to me - it’s literary non-fiction; a collection of essays.
The best collection of essays, I’d say, but that would be an unfair statement seeing as it’s perhaps the only such collection I’ve ever read.
Kreider is an amazing storyteller. His poignant observations of the human condition and his profound life lessons are only so because he weaves them so masterfully into his stories. On their own his words of wisdom may have less meaning and impact. The friends he describes, his relationships and experiences - he shares the greatest anecdotes thereof - they all come together to drive his points home.
He crafts his prose so well every word seems carefully placed, like it was all just meant to be. His observations are likely things that have run through your head at some point or other but have never been so articulated so perfectly. His book can be equally funny and heartbreaking. Just like life.
The best part is that although I am in awe of his writing, I get the sense that Kreider is an approachable guy with no airs about him. I’d imagine anyone else attempting to say the same things would be thumping their chest; a pompous ass declaring he knows best. But not Kreider, not the way he writes.
I’m not entirely sure you could perceive a person’s character from his book. But I certainly hope my assumption is true. Not just because I now have a huge crush on Kreider but because if not, I would have learnt nothing.
We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider is that book for me.
Whenever I tell my well-read friend S, who studied Lit and is the most bookish person I know, that I don’t read too good, she would say that I read differently. “You read a lot of articles," she’d state. It’s true. I tend to read more op-ed pieces, commentary and feature writing than I do books. It’s partly why We Learn Nothing appeals greatly to me - it’s literary non-fiction; a collection of essays.
The best collection of essays, I’d say, but that would be an unfair statement seeing as it’s perhaps the only such collection I’ve ever read.
Kreider is an amazing storyteller. His poignant observations of the human condition and his profound life lessons are only so because he weaves them so masterfully into his stories. On their own his words of wisdom may have less meaning and impact. The friends he describes, his relationships and experiences - he shares the greatest anecdotes thereof - they all come together to drive his points home.
He crafts his prose so well every word seems carefully placed, like it was all just meant to be. His observations are likely things that have run through your head at some point or other but have never been so articulated so perfectly. His book can be equally funny and heartbreaking. Just like life.
The best part is that although I am in awe of his writing, I get the sense that Kreider is an approachable guy with no airs about him. I’d imagine anyone else attempting to say the same things would be thumping their chest; a pompous ass declaring he knows best. But not Kreider, not the way he writes.
I’m not entirely sure you could perceive a person’s character from his book. But I certainly hope my assumption is true. Not just because I now have a huge crush on Kreider but because if not, I would have learnt nothing.
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