Getting down in the pit and loving somebody

This article by Franzen is getting a good amount of attention - despite its self-serving and perhaps ironically self-aware hyperbole such as 'the telos of techne'. At Slog they suggested it wasn't quotable, but the following for me (sidestepping the point of the article but making it somehow more glorious) works very well:

Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of.

This image of the self as failing the self; this knowledge that one can within an instant change all elements. That movie with Tilda Swinton. The God of Small Things.