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He Watched A Catbird Hopping Around In An Azalea That Was Readying Itself To Bloom; He Envied The Bird For Knowing Nothing Of What He Knew; He Would Have Swapped Souls With It In A Heartbeat. And Then To Take Wing, To Know The Air's Buoyancy Even For An Hour: The Trad Was A No-brainer, And The Catbird, With Its Lively Indifference To Him, Its Sureness Of Physical Selfhood, Seemed Well Aware Of How Preferable It Was To Be The Bird.

-Jonathan Franzen

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He Watched A Catbird

Jonathan Franzen

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He Watched A Catbird Hopping Around In An Azalea That Was Readying Itself To Bloom; He Envied The Bird For Knowing Nothing Of What He Knew; He Would Have Swapped Souls With It In A Heartbeat. And Then To Take Wing, To Know The Air's Buoyancy Even For An Hour: The Trad Was A No-brainer, And The Catbird, With Its Lively Indifference To Him, Its Sureness Of Physical Selfhood, Seemed Well Aware Of How Preferable It Was To Be The Bird.

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Knowing Nothing

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It Offended His Sense Of Himself, Because He Was An Individual From An Age Of Individuals, And A String Of Lights Was, Like Him, An Individual Thing. No Matter How Little The Thing Had Cost, To Throw It Away Was To Deny Its Value.

As With All Forms Of Liberation, Of Which The Liberation Of Women Is Only One Example, It Is Easy To Suppose In A Time Of Freedom That The Darker Days Of Repression Can Never Come Again.

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Reading Enables Me To Maintain A Sense Of Something Substantive– My Ethical Integrity, My Intellectual Integrity.

I Try To Write Things That Can't Be Made Into Movies. My Novels Have Thwarted Many Attempts To Film Them And I Think That Was True Of The Essay, Too. If You'd Actually Tried To Be True To The Essay, It Would Have Been, Perhaps, Boring. So Taking That Narrow Little Cast Of Characters And Expanding It Out, That Was What Was Exciting About The Project For Me.

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Falling In Love

Deploring Other People--their Lack Of Perfection--had Always Been Our Sport.

It's Very Liberating For Me To Realize That I Don't Have To Step Up To The Plate With A Plot That Involves The U.n. Security Council.

Our Visual Cortexes Are Wired To Quickly Recognize Faces And Then Quickly Subtract Massive Amounts Of Detail From Them, Zeroing In On Their Essential Message: Is This Person Happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual Faces May Vary Greatly, But A Smirk On One Is A Lot Like A Smirk On Another. Smirks Are Conceptual, Not Pictorial. Our Brains Are Like Cartoonists - And Cartoonists Are Like Our Brains, Simplifying And Exaggerating, Subordinating Facial Detail To Abstract Comic Concepts.

This Wasn't The Person He'd Thought He Was, Or Would Have Chosen To Be If He'd Been Free To Choose, But There Was Something Comforting And Liberating About Being An Actual Definite Someone, Rather Than A Collection Of Contradictory Potential Someones.

The Personality Susceptible To The Dream Of Limitless Freedom Is A Personality Also Prone, Should The Dream Ever Sour, To Misanthropy And Rage.

Everything He Did Was At Least Partial And Often Total Bullshit” (402).

Nothing Got Inside The Head Without Becoming Pictures.

It Took Hours To Turn The Clock Back 30 Seconds.

So, What, You Got Cigarette Burns, Too?" Gitanes Said. Chip Showed His Palm, "it's Nothing." "self-inflicted. You Pathetic American." "different Kind Of Prison" Chip Said.

How Wrong To Have Been So Negative, How Wrong To Have Been So Gloomy, How Wrong To Have Run Away From Life, How Wrong To Have Said No, Again And Again, Instead Of Yes.

Then She Waited, With Parted Lips And A Saucy Challenge In Her Eyes, To See How Her Presence -- The Drama Of Being Her -- Was Registering. In The Way Of Such Chicks, She Seemed Convinced Of The Originality Of Her Provocation.

The Reason This System Can’t Be Overthrown In This Country,” Walter Said, “is All About Freedom. The Reason The Free Market In Europe Is Tempered By Socialism Is That They’re Not So Hung Up On Personal Liberties There. They Also Have Lower Population Growth Rates, Despite Comparable Income Levels. The Europans Are All-around More Rational, Basically. And The Conversation About Rights In This Country Isn’t Rational. It’s Taking Place On The Level Of Emotion, And Class Resentments, Which Is Why The Right Is So Good At Exploiting It.

I Wanted All Of Her And Resented Other Boys For Wanting Any Part Of Her.

Even In An Intensely Mediated World, In A World That Offers At Least The Illusion Of Radical Self-invention And Radical Freedom Of Choice, I As A Novelist Am Drawn To The Things You Can't Get Away From. Because Much Of The Promise Of Radical Self-invention, Of Defining Yourself Through This Marvelous Freedom Of Choice, It's Just A Lie. It's A Lie That We All Buy Into, Because It Helps The Economy Run.

You See More Sitting Still Than Chasing After.

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I'm Not Too Concerned What Happens To My Books After I'm Dead. But I Am Very Concerned By What's Going On With The Culture Of Reading And Writing Nowadays.

Fiction, I Believed, Was The Transmutation Of Experiential Dross Into Linguistic Gold. Fiction Meant Taking Up Whatever The World Had Abandoned By The Road And Making Something Beautiful Out Of It.

Robin Turned And Looked Straight Into Her. "what's Life For?" "i Don't Know." "i Don't Either. But I Don't Think It's About Winning.

He Watched A Catbird Hopping Around In An Azalea That Was Readying Itself To Bloom; He Envied The Bird For Knowing Nothing Of What He Knew; He Would Have Swapped Souls With It In A Heartbeat. And Then To Take Wing, To Know The Air's Buoyancy Even For An Hour: The Trad Was A No-brainer, And The Catbird, With Its Lively Indifference To Him, Its Sureness Of Physical Selfhood, Seemed Well Aware Of How Preferable It Was To Be The Bird.

Knowing Nothing

The Novelist Has More And More To Say To Readers Who Have Less And Less Time To Read: Where To Find The Energy To Engage A Culture In Crisis When The Crisis Consists In The Impossibility Of Engaging With The Culture?

Walter Had Never Liked Cats. They'd Seemed To Him The Sociopaths Of The Pet World, A Species Domesticated As An Evil Necessary For The Control Of Rodents And Subsequently Fetishized The Way Unhappy Countries Fetishize Their Militaries, Saluting The Uniforms Of Killers As Cat Owners Stroke Their Animals' Lovely Fur And Forgive Their Claws And Fangs. He'd Never Seen Anything In A Cat's Face But Simpering Incuriosity And Self-interest; You Only Had To Tease One With A Mouse-toy To See Where It's True Heart Lay...cats Were All About Using People

If You Read The Biographies Of People Who Have Written Good Books, You Often See The Point Where They Suddenly Come Into Themselves, And Those Weeks In The Spring Of 1997 Were When I Came Into Myself As A Writer. They Feel Like Some Of The Best Weeks Of Writing I’ll Ever Have. The Discovery That I Could Write Better About Something As Trivial As An Ordinary Family Dinner Than I Could About The Exploding Prison Population Of The United States, And The Corporatization Of American Life, And All The Other Things I’d Been Trying To Do, Was A Real Revelation.

Here Was A Torture That Greek Inventors Of The Feast And The Stone Had Omitted From Their Hades: The Blanket Of Self-deception. A Lovely Warm Blanket As Far As It Covered The Soul In Torment, But It Never Quite Covered Everything.

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Everything He'd Done With Regard To Her In The Last Three Years Had Been Calculated To Foreclose The Intensely Personal Sort Of Talks They'd Had When He Was Younger: To Get Her To Shut Up, To Train Her To Contain Herself, To Make Her Stop Pestering Him With Her Overfull Heart And Her Uncensored Self. And Now That The Training Was Complete And She Was Obediently Trivial With Him, He Felt Bereft Of Her And Wanted To Undo It.

I Used To Think It Was Hard To Write, And I Still Find The Process More Or Less Unpleasant, But If I Know What I'm Doing It Rattles Along, Then The Rewrite Whips It Into Shape Rather Quickly.

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I Had A Viking Sense Of Entitlement To Whatever Provisions I Could Plunder.

Without Privacy There Was No Point In Being An Individual.

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Use Well Thy Freedom.

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Being Dead's Only A Problem If You Know You're Dead, Which You Never Do Because You're Dead!

I Hate That Word Dysfunction.

You Encountered A Misery Near The End Of The Day And It Took A While To Gauge Its Full Extent. Some Miseries Had Sharp Curvature And Could Be Negotiated Readily. Others Had Almost No Curvature And You Knew You'd Be Spending Hours Turning The Corner. Great Whopping-big Planet-sized Miseries.

The End Of The Day

I Voluntarily Inflicted A Certain Level Of Insanity On Myself.

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Remind Me Again What's Wrong With Dave Matthews?" "basically Everything, Except Technical Proficiency," Walter Said. "right." "but Maybe Especially The Banality Of The Lyrics. 'gotta Be Free, So Free, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. Can't Live Without My Freedom, Yeah Yeah.' That's Pretty Much Every Song.

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He Became Another Data Point In The American Experiment Of Self-government, An Experiment Statistically Skewed From The Outset, Because It Wasn't The People With Sociable Genes Who Fled The Crowded Old World For The New Continent; It Was The People Who Didn't Get Along Well With Others.

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The Correction, When It Finally Came, Was Not An Overnight Bursting Of A Bubble But A Much More Gentle Letdown, A Year-long Leakage Of Value From Key Financial Markets, A Contraction Too Gradual To Generate Headlines And Too Predictable To Seriously Hurt Anybody But Fools And The Working Poor.

For Every Reader Who Dies Today, A Viewer Is Born, And We Seem To Be Witnessing . . . The Final Tipping Balance.

Life, In Her Experience, Had A Kind Of Velvet Luster. You Looked At Yourself From One Perspective And All You Saw Was Weirdness. Move Your Head A Little Bit, Though, And Everything Looked Reasonably Normal.

When You Stay In Your Room And Rage Or Sneer Or Shrug Your Shoulders, As I Did For Many Years, The World And Its Problems Are Impossibly Daunting. But When You Go Out And Put Yourself In Real Relation To Real People, Or Even Just Real Animals, There’s A Very Real Danger That You Might End Up Loving Some Of Them. And Who Knows What Might Happen To You Then?

I'd Be Surprised If Non-fiction Writers Hate To Be Interviewed. We All Hate Them, Because There's Really Nothing To Say Except "read The Book." Right? At Least With Non-fiction, You Can Kind Of Convey Some Information, And People Can Decide For Themselves Whether They Want More Of That Kind Of Information. But With A Novel, What Am I Going To Do?

Each New Thing He Encountered In Life Impelled Him In A Direction That Fully Convinced Him Of Its Rightness, But Then The Next New Thing Loomed Up And Impelled Him In The Opposite Direction, Which Also Felt Right. There Was No Controlling Narrative: He Seemed To Himself A Purely Reactive Pinball In A Game Whose Only Object Was To Stay Alive For Staying Alive's Sake.

You Could Slap His Wrist For Saying It, But Then He Said It With His Face, And You Could Spank Him For Making Faces, But Then He Said It With His Eyes, And There Were Limits To Correction-no Way, In The End, To Penetrate Behind The Blue Irises And Eradicate A Boy's Disgust.

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Good Novels Are Produced By People Who Voluntarily Isolate Themselves And Go Deep, And Report From The Depths On What They Find.

I've Moved Away From That Sort Of Deep-ecological Extremism. I Started To Think: What Can We Do For Wild Birds Right Now? I Don't Want These Particular Species To Disappear.

I Look At My Father, Who Was In Many Ways An Unhappy Person, But Who, Not Long Before He Got Sick, Said That The Greatest Source Of Satisfaction In His Life Had Been Going To Work In The Company Of Other Workers.

She Was So Much A Personality And So Little Anything Else That Even Staring Straight At Her He Had No Idea What She Really Looked Like.

Our Lives Look A Lot More Interesting When They’re Filtered Through The Sexy Facebook Interface. We Star In Our Own Movies, We Photograph Ourselves Incessantly, We Click The Mouse And A Machine Confirms Our Sense Of Mastery.

But She Was Seventeen Now And Not Actually Dumb. She Knew That You Could Love Somebody More Than Anything And Still Not Love The Person All That Much, If You Were Busy With Other Things.

And Meanwhile The Sad Truth Was That Not Everyone Could Be Extraordinary, Not Everyone Could Be Extremely Cool; Because Whom Would This Leave To Be Ordinary?

The Mekons Were Kind Of Like The Background Music Of My Life.

Background Music

The Place Of Stillness That You Have To Go To To Write, But Also To Read Seriously, Is The Point Where You Can Actually Make Responsible Decisions, Where You Can Actually Engage Productively With An Otherwise Scary And Unmanageable World.

He Couldn't Figure Out If She Was Immensely Well Adjusted Or Seriously Messed Up.

His Tiredness Hurt So Much It Kept Him Awake.

Mr. Franzen Said He And Mr. Wallace, Over Years Of Letters And Conversations About The Ethical Role Of The Novelist, Had Come To The Joint Conclusion That The Purpose Of Writing Fiction Was “a Way Out Of Loneliness.” (ny Times Article On The Memorial Service Of David Foster Wallace.)

It's Healthy To Say Uncle When Your Bone's About To Break.

The World Was Ending Then, It's Ending Still, And I'm Happy To Belong To It Again.

The Pain Was Quite Extraordinary. And Yet Also Weirdly Welcome And Restorative, Bringing Him News Of His Aliveness And His Caughtness In A Story Larger Than Himself.

Seriously, The World Is Changing So Quickly That If You Had Any More Than 80 Years Of Change I Don't See How You Could Stand It Psychologically.

There's A Hazardous Sadness To The First Sounds Of Someone Else's Work In The Morning; It's As If Stillness Experiences Pain In Being Broken.

Fiction Is A Solution, The Best Solution, To The Problem Of Existential Solitude.

There Is, After All, A Kind Of Happiness In Unhappiness, If It's The Right Unhappiness.

He Had A Happy Canine Way Of Seeking Approval Without Seeming Insecure.

I Guess My Life Hasn’t Always Been Happy, Or Easy, Or Exactly What I Want. At A Certain Point, I Just Have To Try Not To Think Too Much About Certain Things, Or Else They’ll Break My Heart.

If You Look At The New Testament, It's A Gospel Of Love. Yes, There's Talk Of Judgement And There's Talk Of Heaven And There's Talk Of People Not Getting Into Heaven, But It Doesn't Seem To Me That The Fundamental Message Of The Gospels Was One Of Guilt And Retribution So Much As Love.

And 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?

It's Just A Matter Of Writing The Kind Of Book I Enjoy Reading. Something Better Be Happening At The Beginning, And Then On Every Page After, Or I Get Irritated.

...she Felt That Nothing Could Kill Her Hope Now, Nothing. She Was Seventy-five And She Was Going To Make Some Changes In Her Life.

What He'd Never Understood About Men In His Position, In All The Books He'd Read And Movies He'd Seen About Them, Was Clearer To Him Now: You Couldn't Keep Expecting Wholehearted Love Without, At Some Point, Requiting It. There Was No Credit To Be Earned For Simply Being Good.

The Most Purely Autobiographical fiction Requires Pure Invention. Nobody Ever Wrote A More Autobiographical Story Than "the Metamorphosis".

I Find It A Huge Strain To Be Responsible For My Tastes And Be Known And Defined By Them.

I Feel That Working Environmentalists Are, In The Main, Happier Than Armchair Environmentalists.

Environmentalist

Just As The Camera Draws A Stake Through The Heart Of Serious Portraiture, Television Has Killed The Novel Of Social Reportage.

Every Good Writer I Know Needs To Go Into Some Deep, Quiet Place To Do Work That Is Fully Imagined. And What The Internet Brings Is Lots Of Vulgar Data. It Is The Antithesis Of The Imagination. It Leaves Nothing To The Imagination.

But The First Lesson Reading Teaches Is How To Be Alone.

I Don't Personally Like The E-readers They've Come Up With So Far. I Don't Fetishize Books, But I Do Like That They're Solid And Unchanging.

I Was A Late Child From My Parents, So I Grew Up Surrounded By People A Lot Older Than Me. I Think Even When I Was 21, I Felt Like I Was A 70-year-old Man.

Patty Knew, In Her Heart, That He Was Wrong In His Impression Of Her. And The Mistake She Went To Go On To Make, The Really Big Life Mistake, Was To Go Along With Walter's Version Of Her In Spite Of Knowing That It Wasn't Right. He Seemed So Certain Of Her Goodness That Eventually He Wore Her Down.

Fiction That Isn't An Author's Personal Adventure Into The Frightening Or The Unknown Isn't Worth Writing For Anything But Money.

If Multiculturalism Succeeds In Making Us A Nation Of Independently Empowered Tribes, Each Tribe Will Be Deprived Of The Comfort Of Victimhood And Be Forced To Confront Human Limitation For What It Is: A Fixture Of Life.

I Wrote Two Plotted Books, Got Some Of The Fundamentals Of Storytelling Down, Then... It's Sort Of Like Taking The Training Wheels Off, Trying To Write A Book That's Fun In The Same Way Without Relying On Quite Such Mechanical Or External Beats.

And Silence Of The Lambs Is A Really Smart Book.

Depression Presents Itself As A Realism Regarding The Rottenness Of The World In General And The Rottenness Of Your Life In Particular. But The Realism Is Merely A Mask For Depression's Actual Essence, Which Is An Overwhelming Estrangement From Humanity. The More Persuaded You Are Of Your Unique Access To The Rottenness, The More Afraid You Become Of Engaging With The World; And The Less You Engage With The World, The More Perfidiously Happy-faced The Rest Of Humanity Seems For Continuing To Engage With It.

What You Discovered About Yourself In Raising Children Wasn't Always Agreeable Or Attractive.

Depression Presents Itself As A Realism Regarding The Rottenness Of The World In General And The Rottenness Of Your Life In Particular.

It Was A Way Of Recognizing Places Of Enchantment: People Falling Asleep Like This.

Elective Ignorance Was A Great Survival Skill, Perhaps The Greatest.

Survival Skills

Popularity Has Become Its Own Justification.

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