What I Loved

by Siri Hustvedt

“I don’t think anything is ever just science,”

The peculiar insularity of the New York art scene had often made obvious work seem subtle, stupid work intelligent, and sensational work subversive.

Equating horror with the inhuman has always struck me as convenient but fallacious, if only because I was born into a century that should have ended such talk for good.

the lamp became the sign not of the inhuman but of the all-too-human, the lapse or break that occurs in people when empathy is gone, when others aren’t a part of us anymore but are turned into things.