Thursday, December 10, 2009

Prime Passage: How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

From the essay, "My Father's Brain" (2001)...

"The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies. I wonder if our current cultural susceptibility to the charms of materialism -- our increasing willingness to see psychology as chemical, identity as genetic, and behavior as the product of bygone exigencies of human evolution -- isn't intimately related to the postmodern resurgence of the oral and the eclipse of the written: our incessant telephoning, our ephemeral e-mailing, our steadfast devotion to the flickering tube."

How to Be Alone for sale here.