54 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020
of my life. It was a culture shock, it was
a climate shock. I just couldn’t grasp it
could be weeks and weeks and you never
see the sun.” He later added, “It was a
personal impasse. I’d hoped that, by study-
ing and researching, I would understand
not only the world but my life.” He went
on, “All the books I’d been reading and
all the philosophical discussions—not
only did they not provide an answer, it
seemed extremely unlikely that any an-
swer would ever come out of this.” He
told himself, “There is something fun-
damentally wrong in the way that I’m
approaching this whole thing.”
One reason he chose to study outside
Israel was to “start life anew,” as a gay
man. On weekends, he went to London
night clubs. (“I think I tried Ecstasy a
few times,” he said.) And he made dates
online. He set himself the target of hav-
ing sex with at least one new partner a
week, “to make up for lost time, and also
understand how it works—because I was
very shy.” He laughed. “Very strong dis-
cipline!” He treated each encounter as a
credit in a ledger, “so if one week I had
two, and then the next week there was
none, I’m O.K.”
These recollections contain no regret,
but, Harari said, “coming out was a kind
of false enlightenment.” He explained,
“I’d had this feeling—this is it. There was
one big piece of the puzzle that I was
missing, and this is why my life was com-
pletely fucked up.” Instead, he felt “even
more miserable.”
On a dating site, Harari met Ron
Merom, an Israeli software engineer. As
Merom recently recalled, they began an
intense e-mail correspondence “about
the meaning of life, and all that.” They
became friends. (In 2015, when “Sapi-
ens” was first published in English,
Merom was working for Google in Cal-
ifornia, and helped arrange for Harari
to give an “Authors at Google” talk,
which was posted online—an impor-
tant early moment of exposure.) Merom,
who now works at Facebook, has for-
gotten the details of their youthful ex-
changes, but can recall their flavor: Ha-
rari’s personal philosophy at the time
was complex and dark, “even a bit vio-
lent or aggressive”—and this included
his discussion of sexual relationships. As
Merom put it, “It was ‘I need to conquer
the world—either you win or you lose.’”
Merom had just begun going on med-
itation retreats. He told Harari, “It sounds
like you’re looking for something, and
Vipassana might be it.” In 2000, when
Harari was midway through his the-
sis—a study of how Renaissance mili-
tary memoirists described their experi-
ences of war—he took a bus to a medi-
tation center in the West of England.
Ten days later, Harari wrote to Amir
Fink, a friend in Israel. Fink, who now
works as an environmentalist, told me
that Harari had quoted, giddily, the
theme song of a “Pinocchio” TV show
once beloved in Israel: “Good morning,
world! I’m now freed from my strings.
I’m a real boy.”
At the retreat, Harari was told that
he should do nothing but notice his
breath, in and out, and notice whenever
his mind wandered. This, Harari has
written, “was the most important thing
anybody had ever told me.”
Steven Gunn, an Oxford historian
and Harari’s doctoral adviser, recently re-
called the moment: “I sort of did my best
supervisorial thing. ‘Are you sure you’re
not getting mixed up in a cult?’ So far as
I could tell, he wasn’t being drawn into
anything he didn’t want to be drawn into.”O
n a drive with Yahav and Harari
from their home to Jerusalem, I
asked if it was fair to think of “Sapiens”
as an attempt to transmit Buddhist prin-
ciples, not just through its references to
meditation—and to the possibility of
finding serenity in self-knowledge—but
through its narrative shape. The story of“Sapiens” echoes the Buddha’s “basic re-
alities”: constant change; no enduring
essence; the inevitability of suffering.
“Yes, to some extent,” Harari said. “It’s
definitely not a conscious project. It’s not
‘O.K.! Now I believe in these three prin-
ciples, and now I need to convince the
world, but I can’t state it directly, because
this would be a missionary thing.’” Rather,
he said, the experience of meditation
“imbues your entire thinking.”
He added, “I definitely don’t think
that the solution to all the world’s prob-
lems is to convert everybody to Bud-
dhism, or to have everybody meditat-
ing. I meditate, I know how difficult it
is. There’s no chance you can get eight
billion people to meditate, and, even if
they try, in many cases it could backfire
in a terrible way. It’s very easy to become
self-absorbed, to become megalomani-
acal.” He referred to Ashin Wirathu, an
ultranationalist Buddhist monk in Myan-
mar, who has incited violence against
Rohingya Muslims.
In “Sapiens,” Harari went on, part of
the task had been “to show how every-
thing is impermanent, and what we
think of as eternal social structures—
even family, money, religion, nations—
everything is changing, nothing is eter-
nal, everything came out of some
historical process.” These were Buddhist
thoughts, he said, but they were easy
enough to access without Buddhism.
“Maybe biology is permanent, but in so-
ciety nothing is permanent,” he said.
“There’s no essence, no essence to anyELVIS WEEK
We go to Graceland for the vigil, Hope in the same fuchsia tube dress
she wore to our uncle’s funeral, but it’s O.K. this time around, no-
body hissing about what’s appropriate, not in Memphis in August,
99 at dusk, the dew point making people’s hair deranged. We clutch
our little candles from their cardboard cuffs, and mine keeps going
out, Hope leaning over to help relight it. There are as many Elvises
as Elvis fans, old and not so old and from the farthest reaches, roll-
ing strollers, luggage, oxygen tanks; so many stick-on sideburns; so
many ways to sweat. I don’t know it yet, but Hope’s blurred out on
pills again. We both buy buttons with the lightning logo: Taking Care
of Business in a Flash. One too-tall Elvis strums a ukulele, strolling
up and down the line along the gates and nodding solemnly, the crowd
just slightly hushed. Hope says, Can you imagine being loved this much?—Caki Wilkinson