“... It happened very fast. And now that he's dead he can't remember pain. It's as if he'd never existed.'He wanted her to believe this, but he wasn't sure he believed it himself. If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it.”

American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer

Jonathan Franzen is an American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Born in 1959, he is best known for his fiction, especially The Corrections and Freedom, which brought him wide critical attention and major literary recognition. The Corrections, published in 2001, won the National Book Award and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, while earning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and a place on the shortlist for the International Dublin Literary Award. Freedom, published in 2010, was similarly praised and led to a Time cover that called him the “Great American Novelist.” His novel Crossroads appeared in 2021 and began a projected trilogy.