Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 74

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The Popular Culture Review

daughter that she and Garrett Breedlove, the astronaut played by
Jack Nicholson, are romantically involved again:
"And you know what?" (Aurora)
"What?” (Emma)
"I got up the nerve to tell him I loved him. You
know what his reaction was? Emma?"
"I don’t give a shit, Mom, I'm sick. Not
everything has something to do with you. I’ve got a
lot to figure out."
”1 just don’t want to fight anymore."
"What do you mean? When do we fight?"
"When do we fight? You amaze me! I always
think of us as fighting."
"That's just from your end. That’s cuz you're never
satisfied with me."
Aurora doesn't reassure Emma, but she is there when Emma wakes
briefly, moves her fingers slowly to wave good-bye, and dies quietly.
The loneliness and loss overwhelm Aurora, as she hugs Flap and cries,
"My sweet little girl. . . There's nothing harder."
No stranger to this brand of ultimate isolation and emptiness,
Karl Jaspers explains in "Existenzphilosophie” why the human
desire to "say" is so intense. He writes:
The emptiness caused by dissatisfaction with
mere achievement and the helplessness that results
when the channels of relation break down have
brought forth a loneliness of soul such as never existed
before, a loneliness that hides itself, that seeks relief
in vain in the erotic or the irrational until it leads
eventually to a deep comprehension of the importance
of establishing communication between man and
man.(10)
What Jaspers calls the "act of mutual discovery"(ll) occurs only
in communication, and he believes (like Saul Bellow in Mr. Sammler's
Planet) that the individual is not bom human but gains humanity
through community, through what he calls "communication with