Love

From Elif Batuman’s the Possessed. Since her parents are Turkish, she knows Turkish, and one summer in college, probably her sophomore summer, she is traveling around Turkey doing research for a new version of the Let’s Go guide to Turkey. She keeps meeting Turkish people who, when they hear that she is thinking of concentrating her studies on Pushkin, are incensed, and encourage her to study Turkish literature rather than Russian.

Looking back, I am surprised by how much I took to heart the words of people like this sergeant. If I didn’t actually believe in my responsibility to tell Americans the truth about Turkey, nevertheless I did feel it was somehow wasteful of me to study Russian literature instead of Turkish literature. . . . I already knew Turkish; it had happened without any work, like a gift, and here I was tossing it away to break my head on a bunch of declensions that came effortlessly to anyone who happened to grow up in Russia.
Today, this strikes me as terrible reasoning. I now understand that love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don’t get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things — and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that’s the wonderful gift right there.