The Candy House

by Jennifer Egan

“But science is quantification,” Kacia said. “That’s how we solve mysteries and make discoveries. And with each new step, there is always the worry that we might be ‘crossing the line.’ It used to be called blasphemy, but now it’s something more vague that boils down to knowing too much.

no one escaped the roving, lacerating beam of my judgment. I can access that beam even now, decades later: a font of outraged impatience with other people’s flaws. How had the human species managed to survive for millennia? How had we built civilizations and invented antibiotics when practically no one, other than Trudy and me, seemed capable of sucking it up and just getting things done?

But how can I erase awareness that has permeated every minute of my life since the event itself? I’d have to erase the life I’ve built, and I can’t. I love it all too much.

“I’m not coming,” I tell him, and the man’s momentary surprise, coupled with the solitary slope of Miles’s shoulders (his back is turned), impales my heart like a spear. Even as I remind myself, wildly, that I’ve more than fulfilled my obligation, I find myself aping the motions of a man overcome by irresistible temptation:

As we pendulated up, our relationship to the light began to shift, and I realized that all staged brightenings—in movies, in plays—are efforts to capture this first brightening: day dawning on earth.

If these victories seem improbable, I invite you to recall the narrative power of redemption stories. America loves a sinner, lucky for me.

always with the thought, Any one of these may be x—that ineffable, unpredictable detail that makes one person fall in love with another person.

What she means is that I’m stockpiling random meaningless objects, and she is right, but she is also wrong, because every object has a history and a relationship with other objects and is therefore meaningless only until you have assigned a meaning to it.

But whereas Alison is a complete human all on her own, I have a feeling I would be a more complete human in combination with Alison.

But how is it possible that humor can’t be quantified? Simple: Because we lack a basic set of definitional terms for what is funny. And yet some people are funny and others are not. Some of those who are funny may be funny in ways they didn’t intend.

But where the eluders have it wrong is that quantifiability doesn’t make human life any less remarkable, or even (this is counterintuitive, I know) less mysterious—any more than identifying the rhyme scheme in a poem devalues the poem itself. The opposite! Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so. They are like whodunits after you know who did it. Does anyone reread a murder mystery? Whereas the cosmos has been mysterious to humans since long before we knew anything about astronomy or space—and, now that we do, is only more so.

I wonder if I’ll ever love someone the way I love Alison, but with the other stuff thrown in. I wonder if I can survive without that love.

Sorrow hung about her. What’s the matter, Mama? Why are you sad? Who says I am? We can tell. I’m not sad, I’m just adjusting. To being back. How long will it take? I don’t know. I’ve never done it before.

Why don’t you like talking about them? It’s like trying to make myself heard from the bottom of a well.

Nothing is free! Only children expect otherwise, even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free. Why could nobody see this?

That’s the name of the thing

Patterns of Affinity introduces, with elegant simplicity, formulas for predicting human inclinations. In order to work, the algorithms require intimate knowledge of the individuals in question: a breadth of information that our mother could acquire only in a remote, insular community where the history of each member was known to all the rest.

Only Lou manages to keep pace with Quinn, despite the fawnlike skittering this feat requires of him. Lou would rather look spasmodic than risk falling behind.

It’s the strangest thing when Lou holds his son, as if their flesh were starting to bind, so that letting go of him feels like tearing.

Still, he welcomes the sense of incipient coherence, a fresh structure of meaning.

everyone will divorce. An entire generation will throw off the fetters of rote commitment in favor of invention, hope—and we, their children, will try to locate the moment we lost them and worry that it was our fault.

She and Piers are better off remaining amiable strangers than taking the risk of becoming enemies who share a wall.

They gobbled up a hill and plunged down its backside, pounded by wind and the quaking, shrieking vibrations from the machine.

but a rabid wind invaded his mouth, threatening to dislodge the skin from his skull and send it flying into the hills like a pillowcase.

The night was filled with sounds of foghorns. Chris had heard they weren’t necessary for ships anymore, just a nod to nostalgia. A stockblock. He shut his eyes and tried to decide, from the pattern of tones, whether the sounds were communicative or merely decorative. He wanted them to be real!

Here it is, the world that made me: a fantasy I get to believe in for one more year, according to Mom. This, too, is a fairy tale, and after I grow up, these parties will become part of the lost mythical land of my childhood.