"The Floating Opera"
John Barth
XI. An instructive, if sophisticated, observation
"Nature, coincidence, can often be a heavy-handed symbolizer. She seems at times fairly to club one over the head with significance... So obvious even in its details that it was embarrassing. One is constantly being confronted with a sun that bursts from behind the clouds just as the home team takes the ball; ominous rumblings of thunder when one is brooding desultory at home; magnificent sunrises on days when one has resolved to mend one's ways; hurricanes that demolish a bad man's house and leaves his good neighbor's untouched, or vice versa; Race Streets marked SLOW; Cemetary Avenues marked ONE WAY. The man whose perceptions are not so rudimentary, whose palate is attuned to subtler dishes, can only smile uncomfortably and walk away, reminding himself , if he is wise, that good taste is, after all, only a human invention."
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