Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Paris Review

    Interview with the Neanderthal

    by Anthony Madrid Jun 14, 2017 5 minutes

    Jindřich Štyrský, The Cave, 1926, oil on canvas.

    THE NEANDERTHAL

    I’m already uncomfortable with this.

    INTERVIEWER

    Why? Are you worried people are going to misunderstand, or … ?

    THE NEANDERTHAL

    The whole thing is misleading. I’m not even a Neanderthal.

    INTERVIEWER

    Listen, there’s nothing to worry about. We can start the interview right there on that note. Go ahead and explain the situation.

    THE NEANDERTHAL

    It’s … I don’t even know where to begin. 

    INTERVIEWER

    Just tell everybody what you told me. How you started “listening down into yourself,” your Neanderthal DNA and all that.

    THE NEANDERTHAL

    All right. My belief—and I fully admit I can’t prove any of this—is that the whole thing got started because I was working hard at getting a grip on the differences between nearly identical feelings. My intuition was that there’s a subtle but palpable distinction between, for example, the feeling of being rightly accused. The two feelings seemed identical for most of my life, which caused a lot of problems. But then I started to see—

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Paris Review

    The Paris Review35 min read
    An Eye In The Throat
    My father answers the phone. He is twenty-three years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People call all day long, and my parents pick up and say, “Hello?” and then people say, “It’s C
    The Paris Review1 min read
    Credits
    Cover: Courtesy of Nicolas Party and the Modern Institute /Toby Webster Ltd. Page 12, courtesy of Alice Notley; pages 32, 36, 39, 42, 45, 48, 52, 55, 56, courtesy of Jhumpa Lahiri; page 59, photograph by Marco Delogu, courtesy of Jhumpa Lahiri; pages
    The Paris Review6 min read
    Consecutive Preterite
    1.That summer I learned Biblical Hebrewwith Christian women heaving themselvestoward ministry one brick building at a time.We got along well, they and I and our teacher,a religious studies graduate student who spenteight hours a day transmitting the

    Related Books & Audiobooks