Galatea 2.2

by Richard Powers

tyro

I stopped at every other sentence to run to the library and verify that I wasn’t unconsciously plagiarizing.

She was the sum of all stories I’d never now attempt. The placeholder for the long miss I’d made of experience. The loss fiction fails to repair. The fixedly ephemeral. A. at twenty-two.

voluble.

“Symbolic grounding.”

“The literary theorists have to get tenure. And they have no hard facts to get tenure with. They have to fight for a slice of a pie that’s getting smaller every day.”

“Youth is never cold,” Diana lamented. Ten years ago, fifteen, I’d pitied those who’d let their skin go papery and their blood thin. Back then, this had been my haunt. Now I’d lost the lease, could not even name the street.

‘The Dead.’ That was the one that put me over the top. That made me realize I wasn’t going to lead the life I thought I was going to lead.

off-color.

Memory was the attempt to capitalize on missed cleverness, or recover an overlooked word that, for a moment, might have made someone else feel more alive.

anesthetized

subtext,”

teleology

cupola

parallaxes

metonymy.

about-face,

Before they could even knock at the open door, the vigilant occupant shouted, “Keep that filthy nigger off my property.”

Fatuous

contrapposto.

iconoclasm

I read until my eyes turned to wool.

Perhaps I also meant to scope out the competition. Bring the fight home, into the enemy’s HQ. The English Building crawled with twenty-two-year-olds, frantic with the impending Exam. Each one had made the same error in judgment, giving their lives over to books. Each had disappointed some father, whom they’d hoped only to delight forever with their ability to read and write. Not one believed they would ever get a real job.

involuted

Almost the same roster, down to their names. The only difference was that nobody hung out anymore. Folks were busy, needing two books and ten articles by age twenty-five to keep one’s head above professional floodwaters.

plenary

ephemeron,

One recognized a novel item as a box by comparing it to a handful of examples so small it fit into a single dimple of an egg carton.

Makes me think of prototypical

ratified

The best way you can please me is to promise that my illness will not lead you to even the slightest tendency to avoid pleasure out of affectionate empathy. Try to adopt the opposite attitude; let me hope that thoughts of me will enhance pleasures I’d enjoy, too, if we were together.”

prosody

homeopathy,

“Homeopaths use very small doses. Look. We’re all overwhelmed. We’re all bewildered. Why read in the first place, if the people who are supposed to give us the aerial view can’t tell us anything except what an inescapable mess we’re in?”

surreptitious

demotic,

contrapuntal

acrostics,

512K, low-density floppy-based machine

Life became an interruption of my description of it. I wanted nothing else but to read, work, travel now and again, take care of my C. And for a long time, I did just that.

C. read my Gold Bug code as it took shape, variation by variation.

reentrant

I nursed a martyrdom, and the two of us slipped imperceptibly from lovers to parent and child.

syllogism

melismas

licit

mengseled

The more care I took, the more I turned her into the needy one. And the more I did that, the needier she became. We construed her helplessness between the two of us. And that was not care on my part. That was cowardice. It never occurred to either of us. Protection itself was killing her. The protection of love.

doggerel?”

“So you want Vaucanson’s duck? You want that mechanical chess-playing Turk with the midget inside? Why don’t we just strap some printed circuit cards on me and I’ll take the exam.”

The idiot

contrition.