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"But Kafka's about your life!" Avery said. "Not to take anything away from your admiration of Rilke, but I'll tell you right now, Kafka's a lot more about your life than Rilke is. Kafka was like us. All of these writers, they were human beings trying to make sense of their lives. But Kafka above all! Kafka was afraid of death, he had problems with sex, he had problems with women, he had problems with his job, he had problems with his parents. And he was writing fiction to try to figure these things out. That's what this book is about. That's what all of these books are about. Actual living human beings trying to make sense of death and the modern world and the mess of their lives."
in German class, in a discussion with the prof; Franzen is saying that he doesn't see Kafka's relevance to his life
[...] It was this other side of Avery--the fact that he so visibly had an other side--that was helping me finally understand all three of the dimensions in Kafka: that a man could be a sweet, sympathetic, comically needy victim and a lascivious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore, and also, crurically, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process.
on seeing his college prof as a real, raw, unfiltered, imperfect human being
Returning to Queens, we could no longer stand to be together for more than a few weeks, couldn't stand to see each other so unhappy, without running somewhere else. We reacted to minor fights at breakfast by lying facedown on the floor of our respective rooms for hours at a time, waiting for acknowledgement of our pain. [...]
this cracks me up
[...] I'd replied that, in the Hegelian system, a subjective phenomenon (e.g., romantic love) did not become, properly speaking, "real" until it took its place in an objective struture, and that it was therefore important that the individual and the civic be synthesized in a ceremony of commitment. [...]
lol
Always, in the past, I'd felt like a failure at the task of being satisfied by nature's beauty. Hiking in the West, my wife and I had sometimes found our way to summits unruined by other hikers, but even then, when the hike was perfect, I would wonder, "Now what?" And take a picture. Take nother picture. Like a man with a photogenic girlfriend he didn't love. As if, unable to satisfied myself, I at least might impress somebody else later on. [...]
Birds not only want to use our valuable land, they're also hopelessly unable to pay for it. [...] I worried for their safety in the for-profit future now plotted by the conservatives in Washington. In this future, a small percentage of people will win the big prize--the Lincoln Navigator, the mansion with a two-story atrium and a five-acre lawn, the second home in Laguna Beach--and everyone else will be offered electronic simulacra of luxuries to wish for. The obvious difficult for crossbills in this future is that crossbills don't want the Navigator. They don't want the atrium or the amenities of Laguna. [...] the ownership "society" isn't going to help them. Their standard of living won't be improvable by global free trade. Not even the pathetic state lottery will be an option for them then.