If You See A Person Drowning

One Of The Best Pieces Of Advice 

Take comfort in the fact that you will die.

Facto Solace Mori

When faced with one's own mortality, the mind tries desperately to find meaning where there is none.

When A Person Dies

Sometimes to succeed, one must die.

Happiness is an illusion for those with feeble minds. - Bertrude Russell

Giving up is often times the best thing one can do.

Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man—she was doing her small part to build a better world. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz—outré rocker and Walter's college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbor," an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes? In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

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Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man—she was doing her small part to build a better world. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz—outré rocker and Walter's college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbor," an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes? In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

Ray Li's Key Ideas from Freedom
by Jonathan Franzen

If You See A Person Drowning

One Of The Best Pieces Of Advice

Facto Solace Mori

- RAY LI, 1989

When A Person Dies

- ANDREW BAKER, 1895

Ray Li's ideas are part of this journey:

Related collections

Discover Key Ideas from Books on Similar Topics

Ray Li's Key Ideas from Freedomby Jonathan Franzen

If You See A Person Drowning

One Of The Best Pieces Of Advice

Facto Solace Mori

- RAY LI, 1989

When A Person Dies

- ANDREW BAKER, 1895

Ray Li's ideas are part of this journey:

Related collections

Discover Key Ideas from Books on Similar Topics

Ray Li's Key Ideas from Freedom
by Jonathan Franzen