Having Loved Something More Than Yourself
"But young adults of the nineties – many of whom are, of course, the children of all the impassioned infidelities and divorces Updike wrote about so beautifully, and who got to watch all this brave new individualism and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation – today's subforties have very different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself."
- David Foster Wallace, "Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think (Re John Updike's Toward the End of Time)"
