The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how pain can bring a sense of awareness and connection to something greater than oneself.
In this quote, Jonathan Franzen reflects on the paradoxical nature of pain, describing how it can be both excruciating and strangely comforting. The experience of pain serves as a reminder of one's existence and involvement in a narrative that transcends individual life, suggesting that suffering can lead to personal growth and a deeper understanding of oneβs place in the world.
In practice
This quote could be used in a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
Most of us fear reaching the end of our life regretting moments when we didn't speak up, say I love you, or say I'm sorry.
See, I donβt expect to win a prize for stoic control and dignity at mourning time. Death deserve tantrums. Beating back shocked indignation, kicks in the groin, stones, classified unacceptable, not to be tolerated, not to be wooed, not to be conspired with. Only then can music, dance, movies, plays, rap be about life. Only then can life be cherished and adored.
I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable
Be aware of wonder. Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
I was born on a plantation, and things weren't so good. We didn't have any money. I never thought of the word 'poor' 'til I got to be a man, but when you live in a house that you can always peek out of and see what kind of day it is, you're not doing so well. And your rest room is not inside the house.
I have spent my life waiting for something to happen,β she said. βAnd I have come to understand that nothing will. Or it already has, and I blinked during that moment and it's gone. I don't know which is worse β to have missed it or to know there is nothing to miss.β Falling Angels
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