Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences' having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying they held themselves in the highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nautre--as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance.Random thoughts about her first excerpt: her larger point of frustration at our inability to change is well-taken. There is nothing more depressing than seeing the elderly as she describes.
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The lasting love he studied, not mere emotion, might be willful focus of attention. It might be a custody of reactions. He circled this view for years. Love as directed will did not sound like love's first feeling of cliff-jumping. Call that period eighteen months or seven years - call it anything but infatuation! It must be acknowledged and accounted for. Recently science had nailed down its chemistry: adrenaline. Then what? ... That [love] was outside science's lens did not mean it did not exist. As Maytree aged, lasting love was starting to seem more central to a man's life even than work. Even then building a career and even writing poetry! Anthropology had proved against its expectations that the ideal of lasting love and also its undeniable (if minority) presence was well-nigh universal, in culture after culture from the Stone Age on.
Say that evolution came up with the eighteen months' infatuation. That might be long enough to get Baby on his feet and arranged for, if only by Grandpa or siblings. Then the man can go off and impregnate someone else. Why then do old people fall in love? Why stay loving? The feeling of love is so crucial to our species it is excessive, like labor pain. Lasting love is an act of will. It is a gentleman's game.
On the micro point, being well-informed about politics (if you're not a politician) is admittedly akin to being an accountant who bodybuilds in his spare time: all that muscle going to waste. On the other hand one could look at politics as entertainment, as our national soap opera (although more predictable and with characters so stock that you'd say they need new writers).
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