Page 260 - A Little Life: A Novel

The thing he hadn’t realized about success was that success made people
boring. Failure also made people boring, but in a different way: failing
people were constantly striving for one thing—success. But successful

people were also only striving to maintain their success. It was the
difference between running and running in place, and although running was
boring no matter what, at least the person running was moving, through
different scenery and past different vistas. And yet here again, it seemed
that Jude and Willem had something he didn’t, something that was
protecting them from the suffocating ennui of being successful, from the
tedium of waking up and realizing that you were a success and that every

day you had to keep doing whatever it was that made you a success,
because once you stopped, you were no longer a success, you were
becoming a failure. He sometimes thought that the real thing that
distinguished him and Malcolm from Jude and Willem was not race or
wealth, but Jude’s and Willem’s depthless capacity for wonderment: their
childhoods had been so paltry, so gray, compared to his, that it seemed they

were constantly being dazzled as adults. The June after they graduated, the
Irvines had gotten them all tickets to Paris, where, it emerged, they had an
apartment—“a tiny apartment,” Malcolm had clarified, defensively—in the
seventh. He had been to Paris with his mother in junior high, and again with
his class in high school, and between his sophomore and junior years of
college, but it wasn’t until he had seen Jude’s and Willem’s faces that he
was able to most vividly realize not just the beauty of the city but its

promise of enchantments. He envied this in them, this ability they had
(though he realized that in Jude’s case at least, it was a reward for a long
and punitive childhood) to still be awestruck, the faith they maintained that
life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences,
that their marvelous years were not behind them. He remembered too
watching them try uni for the first time, and their reactions—like they were

Helen Keller and were just comprehending that that cool splash on their
hands had a name, and that they could know it—made him both impatient
and intensely envious. What must it feel like to be an adult and still
discovering the world’s pleasures?
And that, he sometimes felt, was why he loved being high so much: not
because it offered an escape from everyday life, as so many people thought,
but because it made everyday life seem less everyday. For a brief period—

briefer and briefer with each week—the world was splendid and unknown.