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The novel is... the anti-form proper to modernity itself (which is to say, of capitalism and its cultural and epistemological categories, its daily life). This means... that the novel is also a vehicle of creative destruction. Its function, in some properly capitalist __ultural revolution_, is the perpetual undoing of traditional narrative paradigms and their replacement, not by new paradigms, but by something radically different. To use Deleuzian language for a moment, modernity, capitalist modernity, is the moment of passage from codes to axioms, from meaningful sequences, or indeed, if you prefer, from meaning itself, to operational categories, to functions and rules; or, in yet another language, this time more historical and philosophical, it is the transition from metaphysics to epistemologies and pragmatisms, we might even say from content to form.

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this is very important, so listen carefully. As I told you before, there is no middle ground with me. You take either all of me or nothing. That__ the way it works. If you don__ mind continuing the way we are now, I don__ see why we can__ do that. I don__ know how long we__ be able to, but I__l do everything in my power to see that it happens. When I__ able to come see you, I will. But when I can__, I can__. I can__ just come to see you whenever I feel like it. You may not be satisfied with that arrangement, but if you don__ want me to go away again, you have to take all of me. Everything. All the baggage I carry, everything that clings to me. And I will take all of you. Do you understand that? Do you understand what that means?

HM
Haruki Murakami

South of the Border, West of the Sun

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She closed the distance between them and gave him a tentative hug. He was liberally cologned, with a scent that incited bewildering memories. She circled him, not knowing why. She had only met him a few weeks back, yet tonight, something about him triggered old memories, of a time, a person. Maybe not. What she did know, he lacked that special ingredient that moved her. Dull as ditch water. He was sufficiently polite, but that was about all she could say. __ichael Benzehabe, from the novel Unassimilated

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He looks out the window at the falling snow, then turns and takes his wife in his arms, feeling grateful to be here even as he wonders what he is going to do with his life in strictly practical terms. For years he had trained himself to do one thing, and he did it well, but he doesn't know whether he wants to keep doing it for the rest of his life, for that matter, whether anyone will let him. He is still worrying when they go to bed.Feeling his wife's head nesting in the pillow below his shoulder, he is almost certain that they will find ways to manage. They've been learning to get by with less, and they'll keep learning. It seems to him as if they're taking a course in loss lately. And as he feels himself falling asleep he has an insight he believes is important, which he hopes he will remember in the morning, although it is one of those thoughts that seldom survive translation to the language of daylight hours: knowing that whatever plenty befalls them together or separately in the future, they will become more and more intimate with loss as the years accumulate, friends dying or slipping away undramatically into the crowded past, memory itself finally flickering and growing treacherous toward the end; knowing that even the children who may be in their future will eventually school them in the pain of growth and separation, as their own parents and mentors die off and leave them alone in the world, shivering at the dark threshold.

JM
Jay McInerney

Brightness Falls