Schadenfreude, a Love Story Read online

  8.

  Ereignis

  n. event, from the nominalized form of the verb to befall.

  ex. In the OC, it is a major Ereignis to walk more than a city block. (Or to see an actual city, divided into blocks.)

  Irvine, California, is not so much a city as an amorphous blob of identical carpeted apartments and prefab miniature mansions built in at least three clashing architectural styles, located about fifty miles south of Los Angeles. It is a mass that sprawls indistinguishably into the never-ending tangle of freeways and strip malls that make up parched, moneyed Orange County. Irvine’s streets are twisting, highway-fast arterials that often go two miles without a turnoff or turnaround, punctuated only by cul-de-sac planned communities and chain businesses, all with addresses like 50955 Vista Bonita Drive, where the eponymous view has long been bulldozed away to build a SoulCycle studio.

  Surrounded on all sides by four of these mini-highways is the campus of the University of California at Irvine, which is secondarily famous for being the ninth-ranked public research university in the United States, and primarily famous for its excellent (or terrifying, depending on your aesthetic) examples of brutalist architecture. The William Pereira originals that comprise most of the core campus were so futuristic-looking at the time they were built, in the 1960s, that they were used as set pieces in a 1972 Planet of the Apes sequel. The squat, concrete assemblages of cubbyhole windows are arranged in a circle around a large, hilly park shaded by towering and fragrant eucalyptus trees. This park is beautiful, but according to campus lore, it was designed in the early 1960s to be inhospitable to students hanging out in large numbers—you know, to prevent protesting, sitting-in, troublemaking, rabble-rousing, communism, etc. Today, almost all of Irvine’s graduate students live in subsidized housing on the outskirts of campus, because they can’t afford private apartments anywhere near the place. As a result, the university is an isolated haven of research and angst, inchoate but nevertheless hermetically sealed, inside one of the most vacuous communities in the world.

  Moving to Southern California from New York to start graduate school in German at the age of twenty-nine was like being buried alive in Chanel logos. For the past eight years, I’d just had to step out the door of my building to be surrounded by diversity and energy and life. I’d been a cheap subway ride away from interesting things—and if I found myself tipsy and alone in a strange neighborhood in the middle of the night, I could get into a cab and feel relatively confident about getting home safe. Now, suddenly, I was living in that subsidized grad housing—whose primary construction materials seemed to be particleboard and not giving a shit—surrounded by twenty-two-year-old strangers. My randomly assigned roommate, Beryl, was a tiny beauty from Turkey who spent most of her time lighting hookah coals on our electric stove and complaining about how cold it was; our ever-present neighbor, Elena, was an unrepentant semifunctioning opiate addict from Boston whose gaunt body and giant brown eyes attracted every burnout and predatory dickbag within a ninety-mile radius. I’m not saying this in judgment of them; quite the contrary: they were wonderful people, really, and they gave the place its only character.

  And that was fortunate, because I was trapped at home a lot of the time, dependent as I was on my 1990 Volvo, my long-dormant driving abilities, and my nonexistent gasoline budget to go anywhere outside of campus—and, further, since Orange County’s businesses primarily catered to the cosmetically augmented housewives of wealthy Republican businessmen (often themselves cosmetic surgeons), there wasn’t much of anywhere to go. There were no dive bars or cool coffee shops within walking distance of campus, both because if you asked where a cool coffee shop was, OC residents would say “You mean, like, Panera?” and because nothing was within walking distance of anything, and nobody walked anywhere. Despite living in beautiful walking weather literally every single day of the year, people in Orange County regularly—I mean regularly—drove to different points in the same shopping mall.

  Living in the OC was like being stuck in the backseat of a car with a too-smooth automatic transmission and overpowering new car smell, on a road trip through an airless nothing-space, for infinity, because (in true Kafkan fashion), the road trip was the destination. The only recreation my fellow grad students seemed to enjoy was an identical series of house parties held in identical flimsy apartments, where we sipped identical putrid glasses of Charles Shaw wine (“Two-Buck Chuck,” purveyed for $1.99 plus tax at Trader Joe’s), out of identical red Solo cups.

  So what in the ever-loving fuck was I doing there? Well, besides the small matter of the hundred thousand dollars the German department had given me to come be allegedly smart in their midst, the OC did have its selling points, even to someone as pale and surly as me: the vegetarian food was spectacular; there were pockets and exurbs that weren’t inhabited only by surgically enhanced wealthy white assholes, if you knew where to look; I could ride my bike to the same beach that the Bluths visit on Arrested Development; it was never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever cold. And, as a special bonus, after being dumped and disillusioned, I could start my life over not knowing a single soul.

  And yet. Were those good enough reasons? Where was my all-consuming love for the German canon? A reverence that hovered somewhere between religious and sexual ecstasy, culminating in the steadfast knowledge that even if nobody ever paid me a cent, I would sit around writing lengthy research essays about Goethe and Schiller and Rilke in my spare time for fun? I wasn’t sure I had it. Yet? At all? I certainly found German literature interesting—and German philosophy, and language, and culture, and art, and architecture; I was a grown-up now with a modicum of intellectual curiosity and maturity, and had legitimate favorites in each of those categories. (Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Extramoral Sense”; the word angeblich, or “allegedly”; tiny eyeglasses and ubiquitous bicyclists; Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia Hardin; anything Bauhaus.) I also, in my intellectually mature adulthood, actually enjoyed working through very difficult texts that few other people had heard of (much less understood), simply for the challenge and the uniqueness. I even enjoyed this enough to do it for thirteen hours at a time, which was lucky, because that is often how my days went down. (Good thing I had nowhere to go and no money to get there.)

  But still: Was any of this sufficient? Should I really make German studies a career? I thought. Could a person even do that? But I was staring down thirty and had not, as of yet, found anything I wanted to do enough to keep doing it for more than a few years. I quit jobs, I moved out of apartments, relationships self-destructed (or I destroyed them), and now suddenly here I was at the age most people are at least in middle management. All I knew, as I began a journey that would last at least a half-decade and likely shrink my career prospects to even smaller than they already were, was that I wanted to dedicate myself as fully as possible to something really, truly rigorous. Or at any rate, I didn’t not want it badly enough not to do it.

  “I cannot fathom why anyone would want to do this,” said Anja, the Irvine German department’s newest professorial hire, on the first day of my first graduate seminar ever, of the education that she herself had recently finished and the academic position that she herself had. “The job market is terrible—I mean, terrible. There are no jobs. And this is such a difficult and obscure subject. So I’d like to know, really know—why are all of you here, studying this subject, at this time?” Anja was German, and—as everyone from the Herrmanns of Münster and the unemployed room-renters of Berlin had helpfully informed me over the years—nobody has less understanding of why non-Germans want to study Germans than Germans.

  But she was right. The doctorate was a massive commitment. One hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money to get paid to read and learn (and teach, when you don’t know how to teach)—but divide it by several years, and then subtract the cost of tuition, fees, and health insurance, and suddenly you’re looking at a living stipend of less than fifteen grand a year. (“Tec
hnically it’s only for the nine months you’re here,” our professors bristled if anyone dared mention penury. “In the summer, you’ll have to wait tables or something.” How we were supposed to do that while studying thirteen hours a day for our comprehensives was left to our imaginations.)

  On that first day of Anja’s seminar, my classmates—they were named Eileen, Evan, and Christiane—all dutifully reported their Germanist creation stories. Evan was a former opera singer who had begun studying German as part of his training as a Heldentenor—and then read one Schiller play and couldn’t resist the lure. He had a ponytail that reminded me a little too much of the one Bart cuts off a Ph.D. student in an episode of The Simpsons. (“I’m a grad student! I’m thirty and I made six hundred dollars last year,” says Bart, wiggling the hair behind his own head. Then Marge says: “Bart, don’t make fun of grad students. They just made a terrible life choice.”) Eileen had moved to Germany after college to be with her German boyfriend, gotten super-fluent, but then became bored teaching English for a corporate language school; she would use her student loans to finance summer trips back to the Vaterland. Christiane was German, so her reasons weren’t questioned. It got to be my turn, and my throat squeezed itself shut. I didn’t know what to say. I cycled between rage and panic. My relationship with German literature was private and intimate, goddammit, and none of these strangers’ beeswax. And, also—two contrary opinions at once, Herr Dr. Kafka—my relationship with German literature, especially vis-à-vis pursuing it as a permanent profession, was completely unclear. So what should I say?

  How about: I am here because I wanted health insurance for five years while I figured out what to do with myself, and I thought I’d be supported by my movie-star boyfriend, but now I’m not, and I guess I better make a real fucking go of it?

  How about: I am here because my childhood boyfriend was into Franz Kafka, and then he dumped me, and I figure by becoming a successful Kafka scholar I will somehow show him once and for all?

  How about: I am here because I want a really difficult challenge that means something to me intellectually and emotionally, and someone among you apparently thought I’d be up for it, and that I’d belong with you people, but I do not know if this is the case?

  In the end, I said: “I’m sorry. It’s personal.”

  Anja shrugged, said, “Interesting. Fair enough.” My classmates stared at me uneasily. I’d made two grave grad-school faux pas by showing any sort of unexpected emotional vulnerability and by defying authority. The move to the OC had been one form of culture shock, but it was inconsequential compared to induction into the doctoral-study milieu.

  There were so many new behavioral conventions I wasn’t sure I could adopt them all fast enough. For starters, I had to start dressing differently. Worse. Much, much worse. On my wooing visit to Irvine, I’d spent three hours sitting in on a seminar called “Poetics of Punishment,” whose intellectual rigor made my M.A. courses seem like the fourth grade, but whose sartorial rigor was somewhere on the continuum between halfway house and unintentional self-parody. Students in my M.A. program had the same priorities as Maya Rudolph’s old Donatella Versace character on SNL: to smoke and look cool. Do you know what the Irvine crowd thought was cool? A special weight you drape across a book to hold its pages open.

  Franz Kafka was always telling people that he had made an “unshakable” judgment about Felice Bauer within thirty seconds of meeting her. Within two minutes of this seminar starting, I had come to the unshakable realization that real graduate students had reached new levels of not-giving-a-fuckness about their outward appearances. Of course, my future cohort had also made an unshakable judgment about me: I was a snobby, image-obsessed flake who maligned Los Angeles having never lived there, and my research interests in philosophical approaches to Kafka were somehow both “trendy” and “tired.” When we became friends, I assured them that my snooty facial expression was actually displaying crippling intellectual inadequacy, and they explained to me that in graduate school, dressing like a middle-school guidance counselor in 1993 was a mark of intellectual commitment.

  Granted, the irony of my vanity during my campus visit was not lost on me, promising literary scholar that I was. For I had, during the second half of my twenties, aggressively cultivated a look that was supposed to show that I didn’t give a fuck what I looked like. This is because if the fashion world had a Geneva Convention, the early aughts in New York would have violated it, so I chose conscientious objection. Every subway ride displayed a nauseating mélange of three-hundred-dollar whisker-faded jeans that exposed butt cleavage, elbow-length hair blown out ruler-straight, and stilettos whose toes were so pointy, they made the wearer look like the Wicked Witch of the East after the house gets dropped on her. So I invented my own aesthetic based on the last time I was cool, and adopted a late-nineties Berlin fashion ethos of Look Like You Slept in Makeup and Sword-Fought with Your Clothes. I honestly believed that there was nobody on earth who gave less of a fuck about looking attractive than I. But that was before I set foot in a real graduate seminar in German, when I would soon realize that I “didn’t care” about my looks in the same way Gustav von Aschenbach “doesn’t care” about his looks in Death in Venice.

  The other crucial cultural truth I learned about grad seminar was that the more confident a student sounded, the fuller of shit he probably was. Shortly thereafter I also learned that the professor, brilliant as she may be, is but a human being who has either written, or is in the process of writing, an article or book on the text you’re discussing, and is testing out her thesis on you. But nobody tells you this when you’re just starting out, so the first day of seminar leaves even the brightest young intellectuals feeling like impostors—or at any rate, that’s how I felt.

  I’m not supposed to be here, I thought.

  All these people know what they’re talking about, and I most certainly do not.

  How can anyone have thought I was smart enough to be here?

  What the fuck is a subaltern?

  I would kill for a decent bagel.

  Oh, God, pay attention! Did someone just say “subaltern” again? Gah.

  Impostor Syndrome is like one of those antibiotic-resistant superbugs, in that no matter what remedies you try, it mutates and flares up anew—that is, the second I figured out one difficult thing (thanks to untold hours of reading and intermittent weeping), I immediately decided that that thing must thus be something kindergartners could parse. This went for the entire graduate-school cycle: seminar papers, comprehensive exams, even the dissertation. Soon, it all just seemed like a soup of easy stuff any idiot could do. And I was no outlier—I learned that behavior from what I saw around me. And this, friends, is why so many academics are pompous dickheads, because they are all scared out of their damn minds that someone who actually knows what they’re talking about will come along and recognize that the impostors have been in charge the whole time.

  The only antidote to Impostor Syndrome (which is actually not an antidote, but rather, in Kafkan fashion, exacerbates it), is posturing—well, that and eyeball-peeling amounts of work. But I was already doing that, and I still felt like a fake. So all that left was faking it better. Do not ever let anyone know anything is difficult for you, Schuman. I could not betray weakness to anyone, even if that person was allegedly my friend. I could not let on for a second that I felt like a water-treading fraud who was ten seconds from drowning at all times. If someone referenced a book I hadn’t read, I learned to say, “I should really read that again.” (Then I checked that book out and read its introduction, index, and two most relevant chapters for future name-dropping.) If someone asked if I was familiar with a theorist whose name might as well be in Kyrgyz, I just said what everyone else said, which was: “Oh, I haven’t read him since undergrad.” If the person responded, “Actually, Xyvltz Yqctullzxll is a woman,” I dialed it all the way up: “Obviously, but I genderqueer names at random as a performative act. You mean to tell me you don’t?” (I
looked the theorist up on the Stanford Encyclopedia later in the privacy of my room, with Law & Order on in the background.) If I had to write a lengthy essay on a subject that perplexed me beyond all reasonable measure, I just gave it a proper academic title so nobody would be the wiser: MILDLY CLEVER THING: Three-Part List, “Incomprehensible Scare Quotes,” and an Extremely Convoluted Explanation with at Least One Made-Up Word. (Then I employed my all-consuming and overly complex essay-writing system, which involved color-coded index cards.) And, when in doubt, I made a reference to Martin Heidegger. Because what better way to counter a bunch of my own gibberish than a bunch of someone else’s gibberish?

  I was in an especially good position to become the greatest of grad students, because I took two Heidegger seminars in a row as soon as I arrived in Irvine. Dear old Martin is primarily famous for being an active Nazi, but he is somehow also the unabashed go-to favorite thinker of every progressive literary theorist on earth. He is secondarily famous for schtupping Hannah Arendt. He is tertiarily famous for finding human earth language—even German, with its infinite repository of untranslatable compound words—incapable of expressing the most important ideas of his wide-ranging and prolific philosophical career. As a result, he made up a bunch of his own, such as Dasein (“being-there”), Sein-Zum-Tode (“being-toward-death”) or Zeit-Spiel-Raum (“time-play-space”); Gelassenheit (“released-ness”), Geworfenheit (“thrown-ness”), vorhanden (“present-at-hand”)—and my department chair’s personal favorite, Ereignis, which literally means “event,” but in Heideggerese means something more akin to “a coming-into-view” (i.e., something coming into view—you know, a noun). (Heidegger is 100 percent the German language’s fault.)