In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else’s children’s sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.
Jonathan FranzenShe was one of the few stay-at-home moms in Ramsey Hill and was famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else. She said that she expected to be “beheaded” someday by one of the windows whose sash chains she’d replaced. Her children were “probably” dying of trichinosis from pork she’d undercooked. She wondered if her “addiction” to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her “never” reading books anymore. She confided that she’d been “forbidden” to fertilize Walter’s flowers after what had happened “last time.
Jonathan FranzenAs she left her parents' neighborhood, the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one, was a good hour for staring at a screen.
Jonathan FranzenAnd when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.
Jonathan FranzenHer eyes weren't blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still with the void in which the sum of everything they'd ever said or done, every pain they'd inflicted, every joy they'd shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind.
Jonathan FranzenThe father was dry-eyed but the mother kept erupting, like loudly, unprovoked, in a keening foreign wail that was almost like song; it sounded strangely ceremonial and impersonal, like a lament for an idea. Walter went alone to the morgue, without any idea. His love was resting beneath a sheet on a gurney of an awkward height, too high to be knelt by. Her hair was as ever, silky and black and thick, as ever, but there was something wrong with her jaw, some outrageously cruel and unforgivable injury, and her forehead, when he kissed it, was colder than any just universe could have allowed such a young person's forehead to be. The coldness entered him through his lips and didn't leave. What was over was over. His delight in the world had died, and there was no point in anything.
Jonathan FranzenBut the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.
Jonathan Franzen[Patty's] Copernican wish to the be sun around which all things revolved
Jonathan FranzenTag: self-involvement
Laat op de avond, als het verkeer op de snelweg eindelijk bedaarde, leken de dennen achter het woonhuis waarachtig te fluisteren.
Jonathan FranzenRoadies waren het podium aan het volzetten met instrumenten en microfoons, en Walter deed het verhaal van Conor Oberst: dat hij al op zijn twaalfde was begonnen muziek op te nemen, dat hij nog altijd in Omaha woonde, dat zijn band meer een familie of collectief was dan zomaar een rockgroep. Van alle kanten stroomden er weer jonkies de zaal binnen, stralend van verwachting, levende illustraties van de bandnaam Bright Eyes. (Wat een stuitende kutnaam, dacht Katz. Kijk ons eens jong en onbedorven zijn.) Zijn nu totaal bedorven stemming had niet zozeer met afgunst te maken, en zelfs niet met het gevoel dat hij zichzelf als rocker overleefd had. Het was meer een soort wanhoop over de versplinterdheid van de wereld. De natie vocht momenteel smerige grondoorlogen uit in twee verre landen, de planeet warmde sneller op dan een broodrooster, en hier in de 9:30 werd hij omringd door honderden kinderen à la de bananenbroodbakkende Sarah, overlopend van argeloze verwachting, verzekerd van hun onvervreemdbare recht op... ja, op wat? Op emotie.
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