The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.
Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?
There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.
Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
Jonathan FranzenStichwörter: love empathy humanity
Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
Jonathan FranzenStichwörter: inspirational-quotes
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
Jonathan FranzenStichwörter: inspirational-quotes writing-philosophy writing-inspiration
Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.
Jonathan FranzenCooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it.
Jonathan FranzenThere was, of course, nowhere better in the world to be than New York City. This fact was the foundation of her family's satisfaction with itself, the platform from which all else could be ridiculed, the collateral of adult sophistication that bought them the right to behave like children.
Jonathan FranzenGary si augurava che ogni ulteriore migrazione verso le coste venisse proibita, e tutti gli abitanti del Midwest fossero incoraggiati a tornare ai cibi pesanti, agli abiti fuori moda e ai giochi di società, in modo da mantenere una riserva nazionale strategica di idiozia
Jonathan FranzenStichwörter: humor
compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite.
Jonathan FranzenShe quickly discovered that the world is divided into people who know how to be comfortable by themselves on a bar chair and people who do not.
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