Berlin by Bea Setton

Highlights from "Berlin" by Bea Setton

This email was well received, as I knew it would be. People always seem to trust philosophers. Belonging to that particular department is a kind of stamp of respectability. What most people don’t know is that philosophers (who are mostly men) are dirty maniacs.

The cause of the syndrome is disputed—it is unclear if it is neurological or psychological. It is often treated with antidepressants. I have been fending off prescriptions of antidepressants for most of my adult life because what I hate most about myself is tangled up in with what I like best. But if I had exploding head syndrome maybe the time had come to give them a try

This was not the first time a Berliner had told them how lucky they were to come from a Communist regime and how much better life in Venezuela must be. In general, I was to learn, Catalina and Luis despised anyone even vaguely left-wing. They hadn’t moved to Europe to enjoy the free-love YOLO Berlin experience: they were economic immigrants, there to capitalize on Germany’s higher standard of living. It was easy to forget, in a city full of squats and anarchists and anti-capitalists, that we were living in the strongest economy in Europe. The Venezuelans saw hippies, hipsters, and socialists as a bunch of ungrateful hypocrites: if they didn’t like capitalism, t

I was not quite so bereft of company. Although, properly speaking, that early spring was a solitary performance, men inevitably drifted into the orbit of my life. This is not because I am a beauty—although I do have nice ankles and an expensive colorist—but because I am such a brilliant bullshitter that I can blow air into the holiest of egos. I don’t do this because I want these kinds of men around me—I mainly like to be left alone—but because my soul is very nimble when it comes to conjuring enthusiasm for mediocrity. I think, all things considered, that this is one of my best qualities.

He thought, as many intellectual men do, that ceaselessly pointing out everything that is bad in the world was enough to make him good

I was caught up in what Germans call a Kopfkino, which literally translates as “head cinema” but that means a daydream or day nightmare that loops over and over in your mind

They call themselves “anti-fas.” They apply the prefix “post” and the verb “decolonize” to the most unlikely collection of nouns: Facebook; Europe; the collective conscience; dating; the homeless; psychology; books. They are very like the Men with Sisters, in that they think political commitment insulates them from being chauvinistic and imbues them with an aura of irresistible piety.

He looked dubious. He was nice-looking, and an expert at dubiosity.

Can you call a friend?” I thought about this. I could call Kat. She would come over. And I wouldn’t feel ashamed about her seeing me in such a terrible state because she was a different flavor of the same kind of dysfunction.

But souls are not recast with a change of decor. Of course I’d always known this, everyone does, but to live it again and again in each new city and flat, to perform varieties of the same exhausting choreography only to find myself in the same spot, hating myself in the mirror, was draining me of the last reserves of self-respect I had left.

A powerless, sad, thwarted, dangerous man—dangerous because, like so many weak people, he would resort to coercive means to regain a sense of power.

Think of it like this: You know that in the long term your covert behavior will kill you, but the pain of not indulging in it is so awful that you think you’ll die if you stop.