Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft

Self-pity seeped into her, a conviction that for no one but her was sex so logistically ungainly, a tasty fish with so many small bones.

Their problem was that they took things too seriously (self-destructive behavior was itself a form of self-importance),

Assibräuteaufreißer. It wasn’t he, after all, who’d made all men and any woman over twenty untrustable.

Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.

Every facet of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. Whether American liberals liked it or not, Amarillo was how the rest of the world saw their country.

Texans looked down on the other forty-nine states with a gracious kind of pity.

Her body looked to be only a healthy diet and some regular exercise away from greatness, but her face and hair were on the verge of confirming a wicked little dictum of Leila’s: Blondes don’t age well. (Leila saw middle age as the Revenge of the Brunettes.)

The land so commercially and agriculturally marginal that Pampans thought nothing of wasting it by the half acre, so that each low and ugly building sat by itself.

Over the years, Leila had come to believe that politicians were literally made of special stuff, chemically different stuff. The senator was flabby and bad-haired and acne-scarred and yet completely magnetic. His pores exuded some pheromone that made her want to look at him, keep hearing his voice, be liked by him. And she did feel liked. Everyone he wanted to be liked by did.

“Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?”

It was like beholding my addiction to a substance that had long since ceased to give me the slightest kick of pleasure.

Around her ribs and waist were curves of the kind that wind carves in snowdrifts.

artistic genius; she had a way of drawing all eyes to her. But she was fundamentally far shyer than her self-presentation led anyone to imagine, and she kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her sense of superiority, which is so often the secret heart of shyness.

My entire personality reorganized itself in defense of her tranquillity and defense of myself from her reproach.

It was almost as if we’d deliberately manufactured unspeakable pain to achieve this level of wedding-night bliss.

Then there was never a good time of month for her, then we put Leonard in a shoe box and didn’t take him out again, then all we did was talk and talk, like a two-person emotional bureaucracy.

It’s a country of big children, people being naughty behind the teacher’s back, people tattling on each other, people getting their dumb certificates for being good little socialists. People submitting to the system because they’re German and because it’s a system.

“I hate you,” I said. “I hate you even more than I love you. And that’s saying something.”

Before he’d quit doing interviews, the previous fall, he’d taken to dropping the word totalitarian. Younger interviewers, to whom the word meant total surveillance, total mind control, gray armies in parade with medium-range missiles, had understood him to be saying something unfair about the Internet. In fact, he simply meant a system that was impossible to opt out of. The old Republic had certainly excelled at surveillance and parades, but the essence of its totalitarianism had been more everyday and subtle. You could cooperate with the system or you could oppose it, but the one thing you could never do, whether you were enjoying a secure and pleasant life or sitting in a prison, was not be in relation to it. The answer to every question large or small was socialism. If you substituted networks for socialism, you got the Internet. Its competing platforms were united in their ambition to define every term of your existence. In his own case, when he’d started to be properly famous, he’d recognized that fame, as a phenomenon, had migrated to the Internet, and that the Internet’s architecture made it easy for his enemies to shape the Wolf narrative. As in the old Republic, he could either ignore the haters and suffer the consequences, or he could accept the premises of the system, however sophomoric he found them, and increase its power and pervasiveness by participating in it. He’d chosen the latter, but the particular choice didn’t matter. He was in relation to the Revolut...

Only the weak and fearful, the illegitimate, had to brag. The refrain of his childhood, under a regime so weak and fearful it built a prison wall around the people it allegedly had liberated, was that the Republic was blessed to be in history’s vanguard.

No crime or unforeseen side effect was so grievous that it couldn’t be excused by a system that had to be but easily could fail.

Outside, the middle class was disappearing faster than the icecaps, xenophobes were winning elections or stocking up on assault rifles, warring tribes were butchering each other religiously, but inside, disruptive new technologies were rendering traditional politics obsolete.

It was so extreme that he began to suspect there was something inside him, some other self that had always been in him, that wasn’t in other people. Was very unusual and sick and particular to him.

“Leave it to you to have a thought like that and say it out loud.

We’ve backed away from nuclear-winter capability, but there could still be a nuclear autumn, a nuclear November, in which case the equator’s where you want to be. Isolated valley in the center of an untargeted continent. Make sure you’ve got some comely young females, some spare parts, some goats and chickens.

“I have nothing to offer you,” he said to Tierney, “except the truth. Can I buy you a drink and tell you the truth?”

“It’s actually not a bad idea.”