Living Arrangements

 It's time I acknowledge to myself the horrifying truth: I live in a glorified college dorm. To be sure, the place is not technically listed among the university's residence halls. I am a tenant with a lease—not a mere licensee—with all the theoretical property rights pertaining thereto. The place was marketed to me, moreover, as graduate student housing. I imagined it would be full of diligent medical and law students with perhaps a sprinkling of undergrads. 

It turns out I had the proportions backward. There may be a few other graduate students hidden away somewhere (I have yet to meet them), but the typical resident is a third- or fourth-year undergrad: the sort whose parents are willing to spring for campus-adjacent private housing. There is thus an irredeemable whiff of entitlement—emblematized by the uncollected animal droppings littering the surrounding sidewalks that these twenty-year-olds simply decline to clean up, after taking their pets out for a walk. 

I do not ask for much innate sympathy or even conversation from my neighbors: I am perfectly content to live and let live. But their actions are making this uneasy détente ever harder to come by. From the first week I moved in on, the parties have been a problem. Every Friday night without fail, the loud pulsating dance music from the apartment a few doors down starts after dinner, and lasts till 3 AM. After a few months of this, however, I developed the ability to sleep through it, if I closed my bedroom door. 

Like a video game that levels up in difficulty after each stage has been completed, however, my apartment did not let me rest on this achievement. It has thrown new obstacles in my way on the path to sleep. This weekend, at roughly 2 AM Saturday night, I heard the usual pounding music start. But then, horror of horrors, something worse happened. I heard a loud banging at my own door! Some undergrad had taken it upon themselves to try to wake up everybody on our floor—I guess to join the party? 

Once awoken in such a manner, the noise itself often becomes the least barrier to falling back to sleep. The impotent rage that follows it becomes the true source of insomnia. Many a night I have lain on my back, feeling my eyelids begin to lower, only to have my consciousness riveted back to attention and my heart rate spike due to some rustling or murmuring from the apartment next door. Oftentimes, these are innocuous noises, but I am already keyed up and cannot get back to sleep. 

In short: "[S]leep is by no means as widespread as people suppose," writes Rilke, in his only novel (and it is scarcely a novel), The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Hulse trans. throughout). I was in a fine position to appreciate the truth and profundity of this passage when I read it this week. Rilke's book turns out to be the perfect novel to read when one is discovering that one cannot stand one's neighbors, and when one is finally acknowledging to oneself that one hates the place one lives. 

Rilke's book was based largely on his own time in Paris, which he regarded as traumatic. His protagonist, Malte, resides in a garret apartment among the city's poor, and struggles with a sense of loneliness amidst the multitude. This is the sort of setting that—if read about from the comfort of my previous home—would have struck me as a picturesque snapshot of the vie de bohème. While living myself in a crummy student apartment surrounded by noisy neighbors, however, it takes on a raw immediacy. 

Rilke's protagonist compares neighbors, in one striking passage, to a sort of parasite that crawls in through your ear and takes up residence in the brain. Once one has started to register their auditory presence, that is, one cannot keep from picturing their movements, eavesdropping on their conversations, and in short conjuring up a whole imagined world and setting for them that may not resemble their actual apartment, but which one cannot get out of one's mind. (Yes! I thought, that's just how it is!).

Malte's great fear is that he will lose his identity and be submerged among these neighbors, and the rest of the impoverished Parisian crowd—becoming simply one more "untouchable." In this regard, Rilke's novel is the perfect book to read when one has moved to a new city, taken up a new life, and finds oneself wrestling with regret and one's own fears of becoming a non-entity. "Here I sit in my little room," says Malte, "twenty-eight years old and known to no one. Here I sit, and I am nothing." 

The experience of moving often feels like a dismantling of a self, after all. Especially if one is moving from a comfortable house to a much smaller apartment, and one cannot take any of the furniture, books, and things one spent the last several years accumulating, a move can feel like the perverse willful destruction of a whole social identity. Malte experiences the same: "My old furniture is rotting in a barn where I was permitted to store it." So too, all my treasured things are now sitting in a storage unit.

 One tries to convince oneself that one is still the same person as before. One didn't put oneself in storage—only one's furniture—and the true self is something one carries within one. But the experience of insecurity in a new city can break down these illusions. It can feel like a confirmation of one's worst fears—after all, people seem to sense one's lack of faith in oneself, and so they start treating one as the nonentity one feels oneself to be. 

I recall a story from the great raconteur David Rakoff, about his early days in New York. He was already beset by self-doubt, he writes, as a struggling young writer with an entry level job. At one point, while in the throes of this mood, he was sitting alone in a movie theater when a woman approached him. She gestured toward his chest, and asked him if anyone was sitting there—in the seat, that is, that he was currently occupying. In short, she seemed to treat him as exactly the ghost he felt himself to be. 

I am reminded of a similar experience I had back in 2012, a few days after moving to Cambridge to start a graduate program at Harvard Divinity School. I was stricken with an extreme lack of confidence and a fear that I had already taken some hopeless false turn and doomed myself to the wrong career path. In an effort to buoy my spirits, I went to the gift shop and tried to purchase my first ever Harvard t-shirt. The clerk eyed me with suspicion, and, when I handed over my credit card, he asked to see photo ID. 

This was the first and only time in my life I have been asked to prove my identity in order to purchase something other than alcohol. I still can't really explain it; it makes just as little sense as the woman asking David Rakoff if anyone was sitting in the seat where he was sitting. The only way to make sense of it is to say that, somehow, I must have been wearing my insecurity and fear of my own non-existence on my sleeves. I was broadcasting outwardly the ghostliness and spectral quality I felt within. 

Malte feels the same thing—in Rilke's novel—when he walks among the people of Paris. Why are they all laughing at him? Why do they look at him with knowing glances, as if to say: you are one of the dregs; the outcasts; we can see through you. "They give me one look and they know," writes Rilke (as Malte). "They know that really I am one of them, and am only play-acting a little [....] Who are these people? What do they expect of me? [...] How do they recognize me?" 

Rakoff must have asked himself the same question in the theater. I was asking myself the same question in the checkout line at the Harvard gift store. How could they tell? How did they know? I thought I was putting on a good show, but they could see through it. They could see straight to the non-entity I feared I was, the fake of no account. They said to themselves: "that's right; all your stuff is in storage, and you really have lost your identity. You're nobody."

Of course, none of that's really or permanently the case. The finicky Rilke survived his stay in Paris and went on to receive the patronage of wealthy aristocrats with castles by the sea and chateaux in the Swiss Alps. He would end his days in the idyllic locales of the countryside, rather than a stuffy Parisian garret, surrounded by clomping neighbors. Rakoff too survived his time of urban non-entity-hood and became enough of a self to tell the world about his experience. 

The sad thing is, however, to realize how much power the setting has, and how little of one's self one carries around within one, until a more suitable setting is found. The self, as much as it appears to us to be an inner construction, is a product of society. As so, when we are living in a crummy apartment, we to some extent become that apartment. "Here I sit in my little room, Joshua Leach, thirty-three years old, and known to no one. Here I sit, and I am nothing."