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Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is a leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart's getting crushed or exalted, even when you're absorbed in building the foundations of a personality, there come these moments when you're aware that what's happening is not the real story. Unless you actually die, the real story is still ahead of you. This alone, this cruel mixture of consciousness and irrelevance, this built-in hollowness, is enough to account for how pissed off you are. You're miserable and ashamed if you don't believe your adolescent troubles matter, but if you're stupid if you do. [...]
"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.
[...] He was clearly aware of only one thing, his own total isolation. The world had fallen out from under him, and he was left alone.
He had always feared that this would happen, more than he had ever feared death. To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest.
“Who do you think is lying to us?” Shevek demanded.
Placid, Bedap met his gaze. “Who, brother? Who but ourselves?”
The sister planet shone down upon them, serene and brilliant, a beautiful example of the improbability of the real.
ahhh so pretty
Shevek’s first decads in the afforestation project had been spent in silent resentment and exhaustion. People who had chosen to work in centrally functional fields such as physics should not be called upon for these projects and special levies. Wasn’t it immoral to do work you didn’t enjoy? The work needed doing but a lot of people didn’t care what they were posted to and changed jobs all the time; they should have volunteered. Any fool could do this work. In fact, a lot of them could do it better than he could. He had been proud of his strength, and had always volunteered for the “heavies” on tenth-day rotational duty; but here it was day after day, eight hours a day, in dust and heat. All day he would look forward to evening when he could be alone and think, and the instant he got to the sleeping tent after supper his head flopped down and he slept like a stone till dawn, and never a thought crossed his mind.
to think about: the importance of combining responsibility & efficiency (balancing the two orthogonal concerns) in order to secure a more well-rounded population. you lose something in efficiency but it's worth it cus of checks and balances