Reason, in this case, has taken too much from life.The acclaimed debut novel of Sheila Heti, How Should A Person Be? asks a bold, sweeping question that never really gets answered by the time you’re done reading the book. In this way, they never give themselves to life - living in constant dread of the end. The problem is the puer ever anticipates loss, disappointment, and suffering - which they foresee at the very beginning of every experience, so they cut themselves off at the beginning, retreating almost at once in order to protect themselves. If they can just remember this - It is their everlasting switching that is the dangerous thing, and not what they choose - they might discover themselves saved.
Puers don't need to check themselves into analysis. They must reinforce and build on what is in their life already rather than always starting anew, hoping to find a situation without danger. And I don't mean work for its own sake, but they must choose work that begins and ends in a passion, a question that is gnawing at their guts, which is not to be avoided but must be realized and live through the hard work and suffering that inevitably comes with the process. They must work - without escaping into fantasies about being the person who worked. The answer for them is to build on what they have begun and not abandon their plans as soon as things start getting difficult. And yet they started off believing themselves too special for this world!īut - and here is the hope - there is a solution for people of this type, and it's perhaps not the solution that could have been predicted. In their quest for a life without failure, suffer, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful. Such a person inevitably looks back on life as it nears its end with a feeling of emptiness and sadness, aware of what they have built: nothing. But while others actually build a life in which things gain meaning and significance, this is not true of the puer. “Because people who live their lives this way can look forward to a single destiny, shared with others of this type - though such people do not believe they represent a type, but feel themselves distinguished from the common run of man, who they see as held down by the banal anchors of the world.
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