Samir Chopra's Blog, page 122

The Glamorous Life: Waiting Tables on the Upper West Side

In the summer of 1994, broke and increasingly desperate, I roamed New York City, or rather, just Manhattan, looking for work as a bartender. , and hoped that I would find an employment venue which would provide me with the Holy Grail of bartending work: an interesting bar scene and plentiful tips. I could have looked for other kinds of employment; I did possess a graduate degree in computer science after all. But I was unwilling to take on a job that might suck me back into the world of nine-to-fivers, and part-time consulting gigs, after looking plentiful in the earlier part of the summer, had dried up again.  There was no campus employment to be found; my savings had evaporated; I had been reduced to being the recipient of handouts–leftover sandwiches–from a friendly waiter at a local diner. (Thanks Joe!)

So, I bought a copy of the Boston Bartenders Guide, refreshed my memory in case anyone subjected me to a quick viva on cocktails and set off. A week later, I was exhausted, a few pounds lighter, and sadly lacking in leads. It was summer; every bar-tending job in Manhattan seemed to have been taken.

But waiting tables was still possible. And indeed, one afternoon, as I walked through the Upper West Side on Amsterdam Avenue, stopping in at one restaurant after another, I was asked by the owner to turn up for work the next day, making sure to wear a pair of black trousers and a white shirt. I didn’t ask about wages or tips. Work awaited.

For the next few weeks, till classes began again in the fall, I was on call for waiter duties. I shadowed a veteran for a day to learn the ropes, made two dollars an hour, and contributed a percentage of my tips to the busboys (from Honduras and El Salvador). The waiters were allowed one free meal from the kitchen during our shift. The trade was simple: the veteran and I alternated in picking up customers from the front door, took ours to our side of the seating area, tried to get them to order drinks, wrote up food orders and rang the kitchen bell to let the cooks know, checked in at the table after serving food, pushed drinks again, kept an eye out for the check call, and so on.

It was tedious and tiring though, and our customers were often rude, impatient and cranky. I expected poor tipping at times, and I got it. I did wait tables on Al Sharpton once, and he was an excellent tipper. My boss had a sharp tongue and she used it quite often, making me feel like a cross between a poor student and a shiftless layabout. Despite these irritations, I was never compelled to spit in anyone’s soup. My biggest earnings came on a weekend when I worked 22 hours over a Saturday and Sunday and took home 110 dollars. Somehow, bizarrely, when all was said and done, I was earning five dollars an hour.  The busboys had it much worse; they worked longer hours; they had longer commutes; they made less money. This was a fool’s game. For all concerned.

A couple of weeks before the fall semester (and my partial assistantship) began, I quit abruptly. Rather, I simply didn’t turn up for work, and refused to answer calls. I was exhausted and worn out. I would never wait tables again. I still don’t understand how the restaurant industry functions.

Nietzsche on the Lazy Faithful

Those who read Nietzsche often find him very funny. (Some of those who read him find him extremely unfunny too, especially when the joke is on them.)  His humor sometimes sneaks in on you in the most unexpected of places. A good example is found in the following:

On the future of Christianity. - As to the disappearance of Christianity, and to which regions it will fade most slowly in, one can allow oneself a conjecture when one considers on what grounds and where Protestantism took root so impetuously. As is well known, it promised to do the same things as the old church did but to do them much cheaper; no expensive masses for the soul, pilgrimages, priestly pomp and luxury; it spread especially among the northern nations, which were not so deeply rooted in the symbolism and love of forms of the old church as were those of the south: for with the latter a much stronger religious paganism continued to live on in Christianity, while in the north Christianity signified a breach with antithesis of the old native religion and was from the beginning a matter more for the head than for the senses, though for precisely that reason also more fanatical and defiant in times of peril. If the uprooting of Christianity begins in the head then it is obvious where it will first start to disappear: in precisely the place, that is to say, where it will also defend itself most strenuously. Elsewhere it will bend but not break, be stripped of its leaves but put forth new leaves in its place–because there it is the senses and not the head that have taken its side. It is the senses, however, that entertain the belief that even meeting the cost of  the church, high though it is, is nonetheless a cheaper and more comfortable arrangement than existing under a strict regime of work and payment would be: for what price does one not place upon leisure (or lazing about half the time) once one has become accustomed to it! The senses raise against a deschristianized world the objection that too much work would have to be done in it, and the yield of leisure would be too small: they take the side of the occult, that is to say–they prefer to let God work for them (oremus nos, deus laboret! [let us pray, let God labor!]).

The buildup has been gradual; the section begins by inducing a few chuckles before returning to seriousness, and then builds up to the final punchline in Latin.  It is the imagery summoned up by that punchline that evokes the most mirth: the lazy devout, earnestly hoping their prayers will be adequate substitute for lack of effort in the here and now, the required labors outsourced to a hopefully existent God.

Note: Excerpt from Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits. Translated by RJ Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1986; this version includes Volume 2: Assorted Opinions and Maxims, from which I have quoted Section 97 on page 233.

Reflections on Facebook, Part Three

Facebook statuses are legendary. They have been indicted ad nauseam as archives of exhibitionism, narcissism, boring and pointless navel-gazing, repositories of TMI, and many other sins. But they still repay some attention.

The Facebook status typically includes a prompt. The current one is ‘What’s on your mind?’ The one before that was ‘How are you feeling?’, and so on. When they first appeared, they appeared to invite completion by listing the user name followed by an ‘is’. So: ‘ thinking deep thoughts’ or, ‘ wondering whether to go out on a shitty day like this’, and so on. Perhaps realizing the limitations of this form, and the stress it placed on its users to come up with appropriate completions, Facebook moved to the current open-ended style. And the floodgates were opened.

Like just about every Facebook user I indulge in nauseating displays of self-promotion in my status. In my defense, I will say that most of my status updates in this category have been restricted to links to good reviews of my books and updates on my blog posts. Sometimes, feeling especially proud of myself, I post juicy bits from the good reviews. (I intend to post bad reviews if they ever appear just so I can rip those reviewers a new one and court appropriate notes of sympathy from my friends.) I haven’t bragged yet about my wife in my status. I have, though, posted baby photos.

The status update, of course, like the Wall, is part of Facebook’s privacy-destructive architecture. Folks let us know where they are, what they are doing, what they are eating, and perhaps most interestingly, who they are spending time with. This last varietal has generated one of the most interesting social phenomena to emerge from Facebook: the ‘You Were Not Invited’ photo. In this wonderful addition to the list of ways in which social marginalization is effected and experienced, a Facebook user finds out that a clique exists within his social group that does not include him. For besides the usual ‘Having a great time at Joe’s Bar with my best buddies Louie and Dan’ status updates, Facebook users also post photographs of dinner parties for which our poor user never received an invitation. Not wanting to seem like a whiny little ingrate, he dutifully clicks ‘Like’ and writes something like ‘Seems like you guys had an awesome time!’

The Facebook status is perhaps best used by those making a political statement: petitions are sought to be signed, links posted to incendiary blog posts and rabble-rousing photographs with outraged annotations show up in our news feeds. These also have the salutary effect of bringing out the lice from the woodwork as many a Facebook user has found, much to his horrified dismay, that he cannot count on the usual Internet echo-chamber effect and instead must find a way to deal, perhaps politely, with a ‘friend’ who has displayed an opposing political polarity.

Still, despite this enlistment of the status for Changing the World, the status’ primary function still remains the Brag. About yourself or Someone Close to You. My irrepressibly rude comedian friend Radhika Vaz has penned the most memorable–if unrepeatable in polite company–line in this regard. Naturally, she did it in her status. To wit: ‘Ladies, if you really want to praise your husband on Facebook, just suck his dick instead. It’s what he really wants anyway, and that way, you’ll be the only gagging.’

It’s hard to top that line, so I’m just going to call it quits right here.

Babies and Gender Construction

When I look at my daughter, my baby girl, I don’t detect her gender. I am aware of her sex, for it was announced to me, rather loudly and emphatically, by nurses and surgeons, when she was born, ‘It’s a girl!’ I am aware of her sex too, when I change her diapers. Other than that, I do not know if I’m dealing with a boy or a girl. At eleven weeks, it’s all baby all the time; no sexual difference manifests itself. Perhaps I’m not expert enough to know the difference between a boy’s wailing and a girls’ wailing, or perhaps there is some magic marker that I am not aware of. But I think I possess sufficient expertise in this domain; I am the child’s father after all. Why would anyone else know better than me? My daughter’s mother, my wife, agrees; for now, it could be just as well a boy; we don’t see the girl yet.

But there are times when we have seen my girl, accompanied by her gender. My mother-in-law, her grandmother, bought her a frilly white dress, sleeveless, complete with white fur stole. My wife dressed her up in it for an outing to a wedding. She was cooed and gushed over, and everyone told us how adorable she was. It was the first time I had seen her look so ‘feminine’; the clothes had clothed her in a gender. And then, just the other day, she wore a pink skirt, also a gift. Again she looked, suddenly, as never before, ‘like a girl.’ The clothes magically transformed her; immediately, the collected set of impressions associated with white and pink dresses, ‘pretty’ and ‘delicate’, forced themselves to the fore. We were looking, amazingly enough, not at a gender-neutral baby any more but at a creature with a very distinct gender. We had participated in an act of gender construction. (I had noticed inklings of this when her first pink gifts came rolling in after birth; before that, as we had asked the asked the ultrasound clinic to keep her sex a secret, her gifts had been gender neutral.)

I have been told for a long time that gender is a social construct. I have both read and taught feminist theory. (In Fall 2007, at Brooklyn College, I taught ‘Philosophy and Feminism’ using Ann Cudd and Robin Andreasen‘s anthology; I also assigned Ursula Le Guin‘s ‘Left Hand of Darkness‘).  But I don’t think I have ever experienced the truth of that theoretical claim quite as viscerally as I have in the past few weeks, by something quite as simple as my interactions with this gurgling, bawling, cooing creature, recognizably human for sure, and certainly of the female sex as far as her biological inheritance is concerned, but lacking any other mode of definition that would allow her to be slotted into our socially determined categories of ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘man’, or ‘woman’. Right now, she’s just a baby; she awaits definition, a process in which she will participate, and hopefully, leave her own distinct imprint.

Here’s Looking At You, Sherrybaby

The narrative lines of movies about addiction, substance abuse and recovery often follow a predictable arc: protagonist at the bottom of the pit, clambers up its steep sides, slips back again and again, a moment of truth, a new dawn. Sherrybaby (written and directed by Laurie Collyer and starring Maggie Gyllenhaal as Sherry) doesn’t work quite like that.

When the movie begins, Sherry is already clean and has been for years. She is now exploring the contours of the landscape exposed by the new dawn (on the outside of the prison from which she has been released on parole), and what she finds on the outside of the pit is that there are more steep sides to be traversed and more slipping to do: the drug-free world is dreary and stubbornly resistant to manipulation by fantasy if you are sober. Sherry knows one way to make it work better for her: she can still use her sexuality. Her seemingly indiscriminate bedding of strangers suggests, possibly, some deeper pathology, one revealed later in the movie in subtle yet creepy fashion and which serves to illustrate, perhaps, a great deal of her history.

Inevitably, the most difficult reconciliations for Sherry are with family. Sherry’s daughter is now in the custody of her uncle and aunt, and she has grown as accustomed to her foster parents as she has to the absence of her mother. Besides, Sherry doesn’t seem to know quite how to reckon with her girl anyway: Shower her with gifts? Make up for years of absence in a couple of visits? The foster parents who have been taking care of the little girl with love and affection and care are understandably suspicious. Drug addicts, even supposedly recovered ones, are difficult creatures to deal with; we are left to imagine a time when Sherry must have lied, stolen, and wheedled her way to the next fix. And even in this, her new clean state, Sherry’s persona shows traces of the devastation wrought on her psyche by her years of addiction and imprisonment: her temper is unpredictable, her temperament is prickly, hostility and suspicion come easily.

Sherrybaby‘s resolution of the mother-daughter relationship crisis is its most distinctive feature. There is no magic day in the sun, no childhood memory of a lullaby, or cooking of a favorite treat that produces a loving, teary, reconciliation. Instead, Sherry comes to realize–after an episode of falling off the wagon–that motherhood is a little harder than she might have thought. She acquires that painful knowledge that many parents possess: that parenting is not ‘natural’, that the biological bond with a child is a tenuous one and merely the preliminary deposit on a bond that needs considerable strengthening, that caring and nurturing a child is difficult and tedious even for those who might be sober, that no amount of extravagant, short-term affection can substitute for slow and steady caretaking.

The world of substance abuse and recovery remains relatively impenetrable to third-person descriptions; the precise contours of the inner maelstrom of the addict can perhaps only be mapped by the addict. But Sherrybaby is a brave and unconventional attempt to chart this strange land.

The Mind is not a Place or an Object

Last week, I participated in an interdisciplinary panel discussion at the Minding the Body: Dualism and its Discontents Conference (held at the CUNY Graduate Center, and organized by the English Students Association.) The other participants in the panel included:  Patricia Ticineto-Clough (Sociology), Gerhard Joseph (English), and Jason Tougaw (English). As might have been expected, with that group of participants the discussion was pretty wide-ranging; I’m not going to attempt to recapitulate it here. I do however want to (very) informally make note of one remark I made in the question and answer session that followed, which touched upon the frequently mentioned, discussed and puzzled-over relationship between the brain and the mind. This discussion was sparked in part, by Jason Tougaw’s remark that he had ‘noticed a recurrent phenomenon in contemporary literature [especially the so-called 'neuronovel]: scenes in which brains (or other body parts) are  touched or explored for signs of immaterial elements of self: mind, consciousness, affect, emotion, imagination, desire.’

In response to this perennially entertained scientific, philosophical, and literary possibility of ‘locating’ the mind in the material or ‘identifying’ the mind with it, I said it seemed to me these sorts of prospects traded on a confusion about the mind as a place or an object, rather than as a term used to describe an entity’s capacities. The term ‘mind’ is perhaps best understood as having been coined in order to mark out particular kinds of entities that were able to enter into very distinct sorts of relationships with their environments. This ascription in our own human case goes from the ‘inside’ to the ‘outside’ as it were, beginning with mental states perceived from the first-person perspective, but it is then extended by analogy to other creatures that show patterns of behaviors like ours. These relationships display modes of interaction that stand out, for instance, for their rich adaptiveness and flexibility, and show themselves to be receptive to a particular vocabulary of description, explanation and prediction: we might term them ‘mindful’ interactions. So creatures capable of mindful interactions are said to ‘possess’ a mind or ‘have minds’.  But this does not mean that they need be radically similar to us. A different environment and a different entity could conceivably generate the same kind of interactions, perhaps one arrived at by a slow, imperfect evolutionary process like ours. These entities might have brains like ours or they might not; they might have bodies like ours, or they might not; they might have biologies like ours, or not. And so on.

Understood in this way, the term ‘mind’ has come to represent over the years what those creatures capable of ‘mindful’ interactions with their environs ‘have’. But speaking of it as something we ‘have’ send us off and running, looking for it. And since we have bodies with components that seem distinctly articulable, it became natural to try and identify one of its components or locations with the mind. But this, to repeat, is a confusion.

To say that something has a mind is to describe that entity’s capacities, its relationship with its environment, and our modes of understanding, predicting and responding to its behavior.

Reflections on Facebook, Part Two

Facebook’ problematic relationship with privacy issues infuriates most of its users; it has ensured that no contemporary discussion of online privacy can proceed without a Facebook-related example. This has largely been the case because Facebook set out to provide a means of social networking and communication with an architecture designed to induce behavior in its users that would violate conventional privacy norms. Its default options were set for maximum information exposure and changing them required opting out via a complicated, cumbersome interface. This has had precisely the effect its designers had in mind: user behavior observed on Facebook established new social norms for information sharing, which then facilitated the conclusion the modern social networker was not as concerned with privacy as his forebears. This conclusion in hand, Facebook could defend itself against the charge it violated the privacy of its users by pointing to their behavior. The trap had been set, and Facebook users had walked right into it. Facebook shows quite clearly that the architecture of a system can create new social norms quite easily, in this case, those pertaining to privacy.

Perhaps the prime example of Facebook’s privacy-damaging architecture, for me at least, is the Wall. This has been a feature of Facebook ever since its inception, and nothing quite shows off how privacy norms have changed than the way that Facebook users use it. From the very beginning, Facebook urged user X to ‘write something on Y’s wall’. Note, write on the Wall, not ‘send them a message’. That is, write them a public message that everyone can see. Soon enough, Wall messages had begun, and very quickly, a pattern emerged: what people used to write in email messages was now being written on Walls. I remain amazed at the content of Wall messages: dates are planned, medical test results discussed, break-ups commiserated over, the list goes on. Indeed, I am astonished when someone bothers to send a message using Facebook’s messaging facility, so ubiquitous has the Wall scribble become. It’s the first thing you see when you see a user’s page, and the temptation to write something there is strong. And not easily resisted; I have succumbed to it myself on many an occasion. (Similar behavior is observed in the comments spaces of Facebook posts. Here too, users engage in communication which might have previously remained confined to email messages. The architecture isn’t particularly to blame but these are users who are by now, acculturated to speaking loudly and openly in public. And of course, the Facebook status space encourages announcements and proclamations, which often would be better kept private; these in turn, provoke replies subject to the same caveat.

Facebook has changed some of its policies in response to some vociferously expressed concerns over its architecture but the features I’ve listed above are not going anywhere, and indeed, have never served as a focal point of any these complaints. But  they are as important as any of its default information-sharing options in changing our collective, social, reasonable expectations privacy in social spaces.

Reflections on Facebook, Part One

This post is the first of several posts I intend to write on my Facebook experiences.

Like many (very many!) people, I’m a Facebook user. And like many of those people, I have a vexed relationship with it, a fact best demonstrated by my decision to leave Facebook a couple of years ago, close my account, and then return again. (I did so in 2010, and then returned in 2012.) Many users of Facebook have indulged in such short-term separations. When we left, we were informed our accounts would be waiting for us when we returned. I think it might have been an ‘if’ but it felt like a ‘when’.  When I returned, it was all there: my old messages, my comments, my likes, just like I had never left. I had deleted all my photos before I left, but of course, they still exist on Facebook’s servers somewhere. Once you give your data to Facebook you don’t get it back.

Here is a composite of my response to two friends of mine who wrote me asking me why I had left Facebook:

It’s a distraction, and I’m a little freaked out by how much Facebook snoops on user activity. I don’t know what they are doing with all the data they are collecting, and I’ve found their privacy policies quite bothersome in general). I’m also trying to simplify my life a bit, sort of retreat from the techno buzz, so this is part of that. I’m feeling a bit done in by all of it; it either feels voyeuristic or like the panopticon.  The way people are behaving on it is also ludicrous. The last straw is the grinning face of its founder, Zuckerberg.

It’s still all true: it’s a distraction, I’m being surveilled, I don’t know what Facebook does with its data, its still voyeuristic, people behave badly on it, and Zuckerberg is still leering at us.

I returned to Facebook because: a) I had started blogging late in 2011, and wanted to find more venues to distribute my posts and talk about them and b) I wanted to participate in what seemed to me to be some very interesting conversations taking place on its pages. Facebook has helped in both regards: some great discussions have spun off my posts thanks to my linking to my posts there, and I have had some very engaging and informative discussions on Facebook. There are, after all, many smart and passionate people on Facebook.

But all is not well: discussions based on my blog posts have taken place on the closed pages of Facebook, and not here, on my blog comments space, so blog readers don’t get to see them or participate. Discussions on Facebook and in this blog’s comments space take place separately; they are not informed by each other. This is a rather frustrating state of affairs, one that I have occasionally addressed by responding to Facebook comments in the shape of a post here. (As I did recently in my post on Glaucon.) But this is unwieldy and time-consuming. And Facebook’s user habits being what they are, it is extremely likely that they will continue to post their comments ‘there’ rather than ‘here’. For the time being, this problem seems insuperable. To me, at least. (A variant of this problem occurs with Twitter as well, but it does not feel as problematic because my Twitter discussions have been extremely few and very short.)

So what Facebook giveth with one hand, it taketh away with the other. As I will note in posts to follow, this is a recurring feature of its design and my experiences there.

Glenn Greenwald on Civil Liberties and Their Willing Surrender

Today, at Brooklyn College, Glenn Greenwald delivered the 39th Samuel J. Konefsky Memorial Lecture. I was lucky enough to be in attendance and thoroughly enjoyed watching this top-notch muckraker and gadfly in action. I have often seen Greenwald speak on video but this was the first live presentation I have witnessed. It was everything it was promised to be: Greenwald was passionate, precise and polemical. The title of his talk was ‘Civil Liberties and Endless War in the Age of Obama’ and so, appropriately, Greenwald began by offering a definition of ‘civil liberties‘: a set of absolute, unconditional constraints on governmental and state power, ones defined and defended by the people. These should be so stark and clear that no abridgments should be possible or tolerated; those who suggest or support these show themselves to not possess a true understanding of the concept.

With this uncompromising bottom line clearly articulated, Greenwald then presented a tripartite analysis of why, despite the presence of the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights, the state of civil liberties in the US today appears to be quite as problematic as it is and why the US populace has so easily acquiesced to this denial of their constitutional privileges.

First, the US has been since 2001, in a state of ‘perpetual war’, against poorly defined enemies, with no geographic or temporal limitation. This war ensures the endless invocation of natural security as a reason for the attenuation and abuse of civil liberties, whether it be surveillance, indefinite detention without trial, or the assassination of American citizens without trial. The lessons of history have been learned well by the administrations that have held power in the US over the past dozen years: war provides refuge for roguish government behavior of all kinds, and nothing quite prepares a populace for the surrender of civil liberties like the threat of an enemy, one whose threat can only be repelled by increasing the powers a state commands.

Second, the surrender of civil liberties is made more palatable when their abuse by the state appears to be directed against a demonized minority. The gullible majority, convinced that these systematic corruptions of the Bill of Rights remain confined to just this hapless lot, and convinced that their liberties are being protected as a consequence, gladly sign on and form cheering squads, unaware that soon the baleful eye of the powers-that-be will be turned upon them. In the American context  Muslim-Americans have borne the brunt of the the post-911 ravishing of the Bill of Rights. There is little sympathy for them in most parts of the American polity, but the damage done to what is considered ‘normal’ is real enough. Our civil liberties were, and are, next.

Third, yesterday’s ‘extreme’ or ‘radical’ is today’s normal. When the Patriot Act was first passed, it provoked vigorous debate and contestation even in a country still traumatized by 9/11. Its renewals have provoked little debate and attention. We live in a post-Patriot Act US. Its draconian provisions are now the new normal. In this context, I’d like to note once again, the seemingly-useless but very-effective-in-getting-citizens-used-to-the-idea-of-random-searches subway searches in New York City.

Greenwald spoke on a great deal more, including, most importantly, how concerted, determined, political activism by the citizenry still remains, the only and best way to safeguard and preserve the Bill of Rights.

My brief notes above are merely a sampler; catch him at a speaking venue near you if you can.

Mozart on Constanze: Tepid but Frank

In December 1781, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote a letter to his father Leopold, telling him he wanted to marry Constanze Weber. He might have been a brilliant composer, but when it came to describing his beloved, his skills did not transfer so well.

[I] must make you acquainted with the with the character of my dear Constanze. She is not ugly, but at the same time, far from beautiful. Her entire beauty consists of two little black eyes and a nice figure. She has no wit, but she has enough common sense to enable her to fulfill her duties of wife and mother. It is a downright lie that she is inclined to be extravagant. One the contrary, she is accustomed to being shabbily dressed, for the little that her mother has been able to do for her children, she has done for the two others, but never for Constanze. True, she would like to be neatly and cleanly dressed, but not smartly, and most things that a woman needs she is able to make for herself; and she dresses her own hair every day. Moreover she understands housekeeping and has the kindest heart in the world. I love her and she loves me with all her heart. Tell me whether I could wish myself a better wife?

Indeed. Perhaps the mystery of why Mozart was so enamoured of someone whom he could only bring himself to describe in such modest terms as above finds its solution in what preceded these words. For in the first part of the letter Mozart had written:

The voice of nature speaks as loud in me as in others, louder perhaps, than in many a big, strong lout of a fellow. I simply cannot live as most young men do these days. In the first place, I have too great a love of my neighbour and too high a feeling of honour to seduce an innocent girl; and, in the third place, I have too much horror and disgust, too much dread and fear of diseases and too much care for my health to fool about with whores. So I can swear that I have never had relations of that sort with any woman.

If such a thing had occurred, I should not have concealed it from you; for, after all, to err is natural enough in a man and to err once in this way would be mere weakness–although indeed I should not undertake to to promise that if I had erred once in this way, I should stop short at one slip. However, I stake my life on the truth of what I have told you. I am well aware that this reason (powerful as it is) is not urgent enough. But owing to my disposition, which is more inclined to a peaceful and domesticated existence than to revelry, I, who from my youth up have never been accustomed to look after my own belongings, linen, clothes and so forth, cannot think of anything more necessary to me than a wife.

When the ‘voice of nature’ is to be heeded, then perhaps little else matters. Even for a man as gifted as Mozart.

Source: Francis Carr, Mozart and Constanze, Avon Books, New York, 1983, pp. 34-36.