"Love Explained", de John Barth

"Love Explained", um excerto de "On with the Story", John Barth

"Mid-afternoon mid-life lovers, postcoitally lassitudinous and sweat-wet, skin to skin.

Presently: "Explain love to me."
Mm?
"Love: Explain."
"That'd take some doing."
"So do."

Presently: The phenomenon in general? Or us-here-in-this-bed-on-a-weekday-afternoon-in-October?
"Your pleasure. Just explain, please."
Wuff. We may have to go back a bit. Perspective...
"So go. I have a long attention span."
You do.
"Wait..."

Presently: Well. In the beggining –
"So far, so good."
On with the story?
"Please."
The Big bang, of course...
"History."
Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions...
"Likewise later conditions."
If you'd gone to Macy's that day instead of to Bloomingdale's, or to Bloomingdale's but not through Housewares on your way to Bedding –
"As it were."
Or if you'd passed through Housewares a half-hour earlier or later – we wouldn't be lying here all these years afterward.
"Evaporating."
The great god contingency. Scary to imagine.
"Yet he actually managed that time not to get his wires crossed."
But back to the really initial conditions for just a fraction of a second, from T-zero to the beginning of nucleosynthesis, let's say, one one-hundred thousandth of a second later: the first hundred-thousandth of a second of Time...
"To me it seemed like ages. I thought you'd never look up from those Krups coffeemakers."
I saw you. But after all that time I couldn't believe it was you. Anyhow, I wanted to look you over before I officially noticed you.
"I noticed."
The point is, even back at the virtual beginning there were already certain inhomogeneities –
"To put it mildly. Nice Hyphenated–American girl meets Hyphenated–American boy, equally noce but differently hyphenated..."
Her thirtysomething single parent? Him fortysomething and divorcing?
"If they hadn't know each other already, from before..."
Another set of sensitive conditions, thank goodness.
"They should thank the Institute's grant-funding policy, which gives young post-docs and their mentors a chance to rub elbows."
Und so weiter.
"They could've got it on way back then!"
But he was too shy, and she too proper.
"Inhomogeneities."
Were it not for which, the atoms of matter that finally got their act together after Time's first three hundred thousand years would have scattered through space like buckshot, instead of clumping together into of galaxies with humongous voids between.
"Story of her life, till Bloomingdale's."
What concerns us here in this bed on this brilliant Thursday afternoon in October is that a zillion years after our story's beginning, we've got this still-expanding universe on our hands, with a scale of magnitudes ranging from superstrings of galactic clusters down to the electrons of the atoms of the molecules of DNA, for example. If we're going to explain love, we've got to adjust our focus.
"Like so?"
Oh my yes."
(...)


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E o pós-modernismo, o final do sentido/significado. Da wiki tirei: a morte da meta-narrativa estruturante de Lyotard, o conceito de "play" de Derrida e os "simulacra" de Baudrillard. O fim dos sistemas: a realidade existe? Faltou Richard Rorty neste curtíssimo quadro de família.

Acrescento os "litterati":

Thomas Pynchon
John Barth
Kurt Vonnegut
Joseph Heller
Salman Rushdie
Italo Calvino
Donald Barthelme
Don DeLillo
E. L. Doctorow
Ishmael Reed
Cormac McCarthy
Paul Auster
Robert Coover
Maxine Hong Kingston
John Fowles
William Gass
Margaret Atwood
Douglas Coupland
Umberto Eco
Julio Cortázar
Richard Ford