Nowhere was Defoe's psychology more acute than in his imagination of Robinson's (Crusoe) response to the rupture of his solitude. He gave us the first realistic portrait of the radically isolated individual, and then, as if impelled by the novelistic truth, he showed us how sick and crazy radical individualism really is. No matter how carefully we defend ourselves, all it takes is one footprint of another real person to recall us to the endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships. Evan Facebook, whose users collectively spend billions of hours renovating their self-regarding projections, contains an ontological exit door, the Relationship Status menu, among whose options is the phase "It's Complicated." This may be a euphemism for "on my way out," but it's also a description of all the other options. As long as we have such complications, how dare we be bored? - Jonathan Franzen
If you are able I recommend reading Jonathan Franzen's meditation in the New Yorker on the birth of individualism through Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe, the suicide of David Foster Wallace, and the pitfalls of trying to survive on self. He covers a lot of territory I've been chewing on lately. It's one of the better things I've read in a while.
ILLUSTRATION: ZOHAR LAZAR
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