galatea 2.2
For months, my bedtime stories had spun a decameron of long-term potentiation, recategorizing, neuronal group selection, transmitter and junctional molecules. Now, for some reason, my low-level structures, blinded by the harsh light that life's interrogation used to extract its confessions, decided to pull an Aschenbach. A Humbert Humbert. One of those old fools in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Restoration comedy, nineteenth-century epistolary vicarage farces. I meant to make an idiot of myself. (P 195)
"Why do humans write so much? Why do they write at all?"
I read her one of the great moments in contemporary American fiction. "Only it's not by an American, it's no longer contemporary, and it doesn't even take place inside the fictional frame." This was Nabokov's postlude to Lolita, where he relates the book's genesis. He describes hearing of an ape who produced the first known work of animal art, a rough sketch of the bars of the beast's cage. I told Helen that, inside such a cage as ours, a book bursts like someone else's cell specifications. And the difference between ttwo cages completes an inductive proof of thought's infinitude. (p 291)
- Visit Powers' page at U., or pore over the bibliography.
- Salon interviews Richard Powers.
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