We are not the villains of our own stories.

Teju Cole, Open City

“Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic. Who, in the age of television, hasn’t stood in front of a mirror and imagined his life as a show that is already perhaps being watched by multitudes? Who has not, with this consideration in mind, brought something performative into his everyday life? We have the ability to do both good and evil, and more often than not, we choose the good. When we don’t, neither we nor our imagined audience is troubled, because we are able to articulate ourselves to ourselves, and because we have, through our other decisions, merited their sympathy. They are ready to believe the best about us, and not without good reason. From my point of view, thinking about the story of my life, even without claiming any especially heightened sense of ethics, I am satisfied that I have hewed close to the good. 

And so, what does it mean when, in someone else’s version, I am the villain?”

—

As a person of solitary nature living in New York, I too will take off on walks through the city. “And when I began to go on evening walks last fall,” begins Teju Cole’s novel in sentence res, “I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.” I had been eager to read the novel, in part, because I wanted to mentally trace the itineraries of his flaneur. 

But our paths never did really cross, Manhattan being so small yet so dense in its offerings. There were street names I recognized but could not conjure up in my mind’s eye. There were great many places I had never been. 

It was only when I read this particular passage in Washington Heights to the gray 6 am sunlight that a shudder ran down my spine. The scene that immediately follows it—the revelation that causes Julius to question whether he has been a villain—takes place in someone else’s apartment, at 6 am, in Washington Heights. Our interpretation of Open City, of Julius’s story, in fact hinges on this passage. The question it raises is actually something I had been pondering for some time, though I think I expressed it less eloquently as, “Every time you think someone is a jerk in your life, think of all the times you were a jerk in someone else’s life.” If you can accept this—without having to give a long, tortured justification of said jerkish behavior—then you are a better person than Julius. A small comfort.

(By “you,” I clearly meant “me.”)