/lit/ - Literature

>>21964240
>After his junior year of high school, Anthony fled the suburbs for an international school in northeast Italy, near Trieste. “This year abroad would set my life on a new trajectory,” he wrote later in a 100-plus-page work of autobiographical writing, titled “Yuppie Love.” This composition, which he continued to revise during medical school, is spiked with a lacerating contempt for himself and other privileged people -- “yuppies” -- who can’t escape convention, an attitude that was rarely apparent in his public persona. Going to Italy, he wrote, “was a step ladder leading me out of this pool of shit, and I'd be a fool not to use it. This, I promised myself.” In the piece, Anthony described his year abroad:

>Perhaps it was too exciting, too wonderful. Ten years after being in Italy, I feel cheated, lied to. Italy, the Adriatic sea, the teachers of the United World College, the strangers we met in bars and trains, everyone told us that life was beautiful and fascinating, that anything was possible, that goodwill and understanding and interesting, impassioned conversations periodically pregnated with long silences and deep eye contact could bring any two people together … Yes, Italy was good, too good in fact, and my life now is too bad, and it is the difference that is too much for me to bear.

>In medical school Anthony asked for my thoughts on this manuscript and I didn’t read it. If I’d bothered I might have discovered a segment in which his friends in Italy discuss suicide in a smoke-infused dialogue thick with mentions of Camus and Nietzsche. At one point, Anthony calls suicide a “pretty viable option” for “Hemingway, Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain” and on the next page reveals his previous thoughts of suicide: “I wanted to scratch this itch with a knife.” One of this work’s two epigraphs comes from Chekhov: “I find it somehow sad and shameful to admit, even to myself, that my youth has passed entirely without love.”

>Anthony applied to college from Italy and scheduled his Harvard interview in Milan, a few hours from his school. When he arrived for the appointment, my father said the interviewer “acted like he didn’t even know an interview was scheduled.” Anthony felt like he had wasted his time. For whatever reason, he didn’t get in to Harvard.

>“I remember thinking that it was actually really great,” Anna said when we spoke recently in her Upper East Side apartment. We were sitting at a table passing her baby, Natan, back and forth as he babbled and grabbed. “I thought it was important to have some kind of disappointment in life.”

>>18633510
>After his junior year of high school, Anthony fled the suburbs for an international school in northeast Italy, near Trieste. “This year abroad would set my life on a new trajectory,” he wrote later in a 100-plus-page work of autobiographical writing, titled “Yuppie Love.” This composition, which he continued to revise during medical school, is spiked with a lacerating contempt for himself and other privileged people -- “yuppies” -- who can’t escape convention, an attitude that was rarely apparent in his public persona. Going to Italy, he wrote, “was a step ladder leading me out of this pool of shit, and I'd be a fool not to use it. This, I promised myself.” In the piece, Anthony described his year abroad:

>Perhaps it was too exciting, too wonderful. Ten years after being in Italy, I feel cheated, lied to. Italy, the Adriatic sea, the teachers of the United World College, the strangers we met in bars and trains, everyone told us that life was beautiful and fascinating, that anything was possible, that goodwill and understanding and interesting, impassioned conversations periodically pregnated with long silences and deep eye contact could bring any two people together … Yes, Italy was good, too good in fact, and my life now is too bad, and it is the difference that is too much for me to bear.

>In medical school Anthony asked for my thoughts on this manuscript and I didn’t read it. If I’d bothered I might have discovered a segment in which his friends in Italy discuss suicide in a smoke-infused dialogue thick with mentions of Camus and Nietzsche. At one point, Anthony calls suicide a “pretty viable option” for “Hemingway, Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain” and on the next page reveals his previous thoughts of suicide: “I wanted to scratch this itch with a knife.” One of this work’s two epigraphs comes from Chekhov: “I find it somehow sad and shameful to admit, even to myself, that my youth has passed entirely without love.”

>Anthony applied to college from Italy and scheduled his Harvard interview in Milan, a few hours from his school. When he arrived for the appointment, my father said the interviewer “acted like he didn’t even know an interview was scheduled.” Anthony felt like he had wasted his time. For whatever reason, he didn’t get in to Harvard.

>“I remember thinking that it was actually really great,” Anna said when we spoke recently in her Upper East Side apartment. We were sitting at a table passing her baby, Natan, back and forth as he babbled and grabbed. “I thought it was important to have some kind of disappointment in life.”

>After his junior year of high school, Anthony fled the suburbs for an international school in northeast Italy, near Trieste. “This year abroad would set my life on a new trajectory,” he wrote later in a 100-plus-page work of autobiographical writing, titled “Yuppie Love.” This composition, which he continued to revise during medical school, is spiked with a lacerating contempt for himself and other privileged people -- “yuppies” -- who can’t escape convention, an attitude that was rarely apparent in his public persona. Going to Italy, he wrote, “was a step ladder leading me out of this pool of shit, and I'd be a fool not to use it. This, I promised myself.” In the piece, Anthony described his year abroad:

>Perhaps it was too exciting, too wonderful. Ten years after being in Italy, I feel cheated, lied to. Italy, the Adriatic sea, the teachers of the United World College, the strangers we met in bars and trains, everyone told us that life was beautiful and fascinating, that anything was possible, that goodwill and understanding and interesting, impassioned conversations periodically pregnated with long silences and deep eye contact could bring any two people together … Yes, Italy was good, too good in fact, and my life now is too bad, and it is the difference that is too much for me to bear.

>In medical school Anthony asked for my thoughts on this manuscript and I didn’t read it. If I’d bothered I might have discovered a segment in which his friends in Italy discuss suicide in a smoke-infused dialogue thick with mentions of Camus and Nietzsche. At one point, Anthony calls suicide a “pretty viable option” for “Hemingway, Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain” and on the next page reveals his previous thoughts of suicide: “I wanted to scratch this itch with a knife.” One of this work’s two epigraphs comes from Chekhov: “I find it somehow sad and shameful to admit, even to myself, that my youth has passed entirely without love.”

>Anthony applied to college from Italy and scheduled his Harvard interview in Milan, a few hours from his school. When he arrived for the appointment, my father said the interviewer “acted like he didn’t even know an interview was scheduled.” Anthony felt like he had wasted his time. For whatever reason, he didn’t get in to Harvard.

>“I remember thinking that it was actually really great,” Anna said when we spoke recently in her Upper East Side apartment. We were sitting at a table passing her baby, Natan, back and forth as he babbled and grabbed. “I thought it was important to have some kind of disappointment in life.”