Yesterday I quoted a paragraph from Jonathan Franzen’s recent New Yorker article which resonated with me.  It’s a good paragraph but it’s simple and direct.  After praising Franzen for his nuanced writing it’s appropriate to provide an example.  One that comes to mind is something he wrote for Harper’s Magazine in 1992.   It was part of a collection of pieces for an article, “She’s come for an abortion.  What do you say?”  The lead-in to the article was

Few arguments in America inspire as much passion as the one about abortion. In the twenty years since Roe v. Wade, the debate has degenerated into the vocabulary of rage-shouted insults, angry chants, bloody pictures. Politics requires starkly drawn lines: we must be either pro-life or pro-choice; an abortion is either murder or an insignificant procedure.  But in our personal conversations about abortion, a more subtle dialogue is taking place-discussions of life and death, rights and responsibilities, hope and regret.  Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld most of Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act, including a provision that requires a woman seeking an abortion to listen to a doctor’s speech about the operation twenty-four hours before it can take place.  But what if this moment were used not for the exchange of dry, clinical information but to help us see the deeper truths buried beneath the partisan slogans?  With this in mind, the editors of Harper’s Magazine asked fourteen writers for the words they would speak to a woman who was a day away from her abortion.

Franzen addressed the question but he went beyond that and spoke to the more fundamental nature and meaning of one’s choices:

So you’re making a choice. How does it feel? Does it feel like one of those million other choices that Americans are so proud of? Like between Coke and Pepsi? McNuggets and McRibs?

The word “choice” appears constantly in our advertising, almost as often as the word “new.” It’s as effective at moving products as skin or Old Glory. It strokes the country the way it likes to be stroked-with the notion that a free market means free people.

The truth is harder. The truth is that freedom lies not in the number of choices available to you but in the self-knowledge that comes once you have chosen. The harder the choices are, the better they define you. The real choices are the ones you make alone, far from the marketplace with nothing but your heart and conscience.

General Motors would like you to believe that Cadillac owners are a special breed of humanity. In fact, owning a Cadillac tells you precisely nothing about your character. Decide not to own a car at all, however, and you begin to get a glimmer of what kind of person you might be. Decide to carry a child to term despite the professional inconvenience; decide to terminate your pregnancy despite your longing for a child; decide to tell your mother; decide to defy your father; decide anything for real, and you will never forget who you are.

Naturally, the state’s anxiety increases as your choices grow more personal. The government happily grants you the choice between Channel 38 and Channel 45, but if you’re thinking of having an abortion, the government insists you think some more.  Which maybe all for the best – as long as you make good use of the time. Don’t change your mind, just get to know it. Deepen your decision into a choice, if you haven’t already. Let it define you.

That spoke to me when I was twenty-five.   They’re still good words to live by I think.