Shields - Other people: takes & mistakes

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Life Is ShortArt Is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity, coeditor with Elizabeth Cooperman

I Think Youre Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, coauthor with Caleb Powell

Salinger, coauthor with Shane Salerno

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Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, Found Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, coeditor with Matthew Vollmer

Jeff, One Lonely Guy, coauthor with Jeff Ragsdale and Michael Logan

The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, coeditor with Bradford Morrow

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

The Thing About Life Is That One Day Youll Be Dead

Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine

Enough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography

Baseball Is Just Baseball: The Understated Ichiro

Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season

Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity

Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories

Dead Languages: A Novel

Heroes: A Novel

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2017 by David Shields

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC: Excerpt of Esthetique du Mal from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Dover Publications: Excerpt from The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by E. F. J. Payne. Reprinted by permission of Dover Publications. Guardian News & Media Ltd: Excerpt from Odd One In by Chloe Veltman, originally published in The Guardian (www.theguardian.com) on June 12, 2006. Copyright 2016 by Guardian News & Media Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Guardian News & Media Ltd. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company: Excerpt from American Pastoral by Philip Roth, copyright 1997 by Philip Roth. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. The New York Times: Excerpt from The New York Times, March 18, 1984, copyright 1984 by The New York Times. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: Excerpt from Around Pastor Bonhoeffer from Passing Through: The Later Poems New and Selected by Stanley Kunitz, copyright 1970 by Stanley Kunitz. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shields, David, 1956 author.

Title: Other people : takes & mistakes / David Shields.

Description: New York : Knopf, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016022400 | ISBN 9780385351997 (hardback) | ISBN 9780385352000 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : Other (Philosophy) | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY /

Personal Memoirs. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS /

American / General.

Classification: LCC PS 3569. H 4834 A 6 2017 | DDC 814/.54dc23 LC record

available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022400

Ebook ISBN9780385352000

Cover photographs made by Robert Capa International Center of Photography / Magnum Photos

Cover design by Chip Kidd

Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

Thanks to Artist Trust for the Arts Innovator Award and to Arne Christensen, Kristen Coates, Erik Fenner, and Russell Harper for their research assistance.

v4.1

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For Ann Close

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while youre anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while youre with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one anothers interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. Its getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. Thats how we know were alive: were wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.

But if you can do thatwell, lucky you.

PHILIP ROTH