The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

“And Ted’s right on top of that, he thinks our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it’s out of control, it’s not computers that are making everything virtual, it’s mental health. Everyone’s trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to, is what Ted says. We’ve bumped up to the next level of abstraction because we have too much time and money, is what he says, and he refuses to be a part of it. He wants to eat ‘real’ food and go to ‘real’ places and talk about ‘real’ things like business and science. So he and I don’t really agree at all anymore on what’s important in life.

The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself.

Fear of humiliation and the craving for humiliation are closely linked: psychologists know it, Russian novelists know it.

how sweet the optimism of the person carrying a newly scored drug that she believed would change her head; how universal the craving to escape the givens of the self.

They came to him now, these forgotten counterexamples, because in the end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for but your children.

Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow. They said digital and democracy and history.

The for-profit nation-state, with a globally dispersed citizenry of shareholders, is the next stage in the evolution of political economy. ‘Enlightened neotechnofeudalism’ is blossoming

In their phony solicitude, their thinly veiled contempt, he saw the future that he’d chosen in the water. It was a nursing-home future and it made him weep. He should have just drowned.

Without privacy there was no point in being an individual. And they would give him no privacy in a nursing home.

The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself. There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.

You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food and how much home was in homemade.

Evidently every hour of the year, including this one, was a good hour for staring at a screen.

He’d lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he’d lost track of himself.