Purity

Jonathan Franzen, 2015
Fourth Estate - London

A pureza é afinal impossível, a não ser que a tomemos por obsessão. A frustração de falhar nas relações amorosas, familiares e laborais. Segredos desvendados atrás de segredos, visões e vozes que se cruzam, o tempo utilizado de forma elástica.

6 All these good-hearted San Lorenzo Valley types had glimpsed in Pip's mother what Pip herself, in her early teens, had seen and felt proud of: an ineffable sort of greatness. You didn't have to write to be a poet, you didn't have to create things to be an artist. Her mother's spiritual endeavor was itself a kind of art - an art of invisibility. There was never a television in their cabin and no computer before Pip turned twelve; her mother's main source of news was the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which she read for the small daily pleasure of being appalled by the world.

45 Garth and Erik imagined a labor utopia. Their theory was that the technology-driven gains in productivity and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs would inevitably result in better wealth distribution, when capital realized that it could not afford to pauperize the consumers who bought its robot-made products.

103 As the chief state economist, he was responsible for the wholesale massaging of data, for demonstrating increases in productivity where there weren't any, for balancing a budget that every year drifted farther from reality, for adjusting official exchange rates to maximize the budgetary impact of whatever hard currency the Republic could finagle or extort, for magnifying the economy's few successes and making optimistic excuses for its many failures. The top party leaders could afford to be stupid or cynical about his numbers, but he himself had to believe in the story they told. This required political conviction, self-deception, and, perhaps especially, self-pity.

180 The leading occupational hazard of Leila's job was sources who wanted to be friends with her. The world was overpopulated by talkers and underpopulated by listeners, and many of her sources gave her the impression that she was the first person who'd ever truly listened to them.

187 On a rare good day, he might produce a long paragraph - disconnected, like all its fellows, from any other paragraph - that made her hoot with laughter.

202 "I'm sorry", she said. "But I wouldn't be a responsible journalist if I didn't hear your side of the story. "There is no story". Well, see, but that's a side itself. Because other sides are saying there is a story.

204 The irony of the internet is that it's made the journalist's job so much easier. You can research in five minutes what used to take five days. But the internet is also killing journalism. There's no substitute for the reporter who's worked a beat for twenty years, who's cultivated sources, who can see the difference between a story and a non-story. Google and accurint can make you feel very smart, but the best stories come when you're out in the field. Your source makes some off-hand remark, and suddenly you see the real story. That's when I feel most alive, when I'm sitting at the computer I'm only half-alive.

492 He was so immersed and implicated in the internet, so enmeshed in its totalitarism, that his online existence was coming to seem realer than his physical self. Who even cared what a person's private thoughts about him were? Private thoughts didn't exist in the retrievable, disseminable and readable way that data did. The aim of the internet (...) was to liberate humanity from the tasks - making things, learning things, remembering things - that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization.

539 The world ... an eternal struggle for power - power, power power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for something so lonely and oppressive in the having of it, Secrets were power, money was power, being needed was power.

546 Yes, a kind of heaven: long rallies on an autumn evening, the exercise of skill in light still good enough to hit by, the faithful pock of a tennis ball. It was enough.
The sun went down, the air was deliciously cool, and they kept hitting, the ball bouncing up in a low arc. That instant of connecting, the satisfaction of reversing the ball's inertia, the sweetness of the sweet spot (...) perfect contentment.

526 Could a more perfectly manufactured object than a tennis ball be imagined? Fuzzy and spherical, squeezable and bouncy, its stitching a pair of matching tongues, its voice on impact a pock in the most pleasing of registers.