Middlesex

by Jeffrey Eugenides

German wasn’t good for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn’t interrupt.

Of course, a narrator in my position (prefetal at the time) can’t be entirely sure about any of this.

Planning is for the world’s great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to

Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

In the eighteenth row my grandmother gave her critical opinion. “It’s like the paintings in the museum,” she said. “Just an excuse to show people with no clothes.”

“I guess it must be a lot harder to be a priest over here in America, huh?” “How do you mean?” Michael Antoniou asked. “I just mean that over in the old country people aren’t too well educated,” Milton said. “They’ll believe whatever stories the priests tell them. Here it’s different. You can go to college and learn to think for yourself.” “The Church doesn’t want people not to think,” Michael replied without taking offense. “The Church believes that thinking will take a person only so far. Where thinking ends, revelation begins.” “Chrysostomos!” Desdemona exclaimed. “Father Mike, you have a mouth of gold.” But Milton persisted, “I’d say where thinking ends, stupidity begins.”