Galatea 2.2

by Richard Powers

Now that I’d told New York there would be no more fictions, anything might happen. In fact, it already had. My life story was one only through the barest red-penciled edits. On second reading, everything seemed different. I’d forgotten all the good bits, the scene swellers and interstices, the supporting characters and exotic locales, there for no reason but density and flavor. I wasn’t the genre I’d thought I was.

All this awakened alien sensation came home to rest in A. In my idea of A.

macaronic,

The lab swarmed at all hours with students trying to coax paper assignments out of recalcitrant keyboards.

parochial.

parallax

Yet I learned that a love fostered on caretaking crippled the loved one, or, one day—worse—it did what it promised and worked its worldly cure.

insouciance,

belle lettres?

“Humanity? Common core? You’d be run out of the field on a rail for essentializing. And you wonder why the posthumanists reduced your type to an author function.”

I knew nothing about literature then, and so still thought it possible to write.

cavalcade.

heuristic

A skip in the flow, too brief to measure, said I’d overstepped. Broken the unspoken. I should have known. Nobody had to tell me. I just slipped.

qua

The life we lead is our only maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it.

carte blanche

Life meant convincing another that you knew what it meant to be alive. The world’s Turing Test was not yet over. “