David Foster Wallace y Jonathan Franzen.
-Este
discurso que Jonathan Franzen dio en la
Universidad
"This is not to say that love is only about fighting.
Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that
another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I
understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a
worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the
self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person,
and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you
have to surrender some of your self.
The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all
handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool
of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable
surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect
of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so
tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.
And
yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an
anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as
the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world.
To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to
yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is
to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and
burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense
of the word) a consumer."
-Y sobre el amor y
su amigo el escritor David Foster Wallace habla aquí:
"He
was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love
with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it’s
because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong
prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a
distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy,
sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy.
What he’d seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of
drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction,
seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability.
Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide
attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he
felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of
indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way
out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer,
finally, than love.”
-Siempre me ha gustado esta frase de
Dave Eggers sobre, como dice Franzen en su discurso, el error de aplazar o
evitar el amor por algo o por alguien:
“I will not
wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be
time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is
no way to live, to wait to love.”
-Dave
Eggers, What Is the What.
