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Invisible and eternal things are made known through visible and temporal things. —Hildegard von Bingen, Benedictine abbess, 1151
Like many men who have weathered female rejection, the man in Apartment C12 believes that women have more power than anyone else on the planet. When evidence suggests that this can’t be true, he gets angry. It is an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument.
Often, he feels the weight of phantom lumber on his back like a child. Often, he feels the weight of a phantom child on his back like lumber.
Kara had a taste for neon clothing, cinnamon gum, and anguished men.
If you want to understand the human condition, pay close attention to infants: the stakes are simultaneously at their highest, because you could die at any moment, and at their lowest, because someone bigger is satisfying every need. Language and agency have not yet arrived. What’s that like? Observe a baby.
panning the day for peril.
“They were spectacularly unusual, the mystics. Blessed Anna Maria Taigi, for example? She said she could see the future by looking into this—this sort of sun globe? And Gabrielle Bossis—a French actress—she wrote a book transcribing her conversations with Jesus. Word for word, can you imagine? Therese Neumann never ate or drank anything besides the Eucharist. Marie Rose Ferron had her first vision of Jesus at the age of six. In Massachusetts, no less. And then there was Gemma Galgani. Daughter of passion, they called her. People were always walking in on Gemma in the middle of divine ecstasy,
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“Blessed Maria Bolognesi’s another good one. She had a rough childhood—malnourishment, illness after illness, abusive stepfather, so forth, we’ve all been there—but then to top it off, she was possessed for about a year.
Blandine continues, sprinting via language from the storm inside her,
She normally tries to avoid saying in which out loud, to minimize the number of people who find her insufferable.
when a person is in the middle of divine ecstasy, she’s really just interacting with herself.
There’s no way to overthrow the system without going outside and making some eye contact.
attacked by an awareness of how impossible it is to learn and accomplish all that she needs to learn and accomplish before she dies.
In general, she feels too much or too little, interacts too much or too little—never the proper amount.
Supplement therapy with boxing lessons. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
If you see someone weeping on a bridge, always stop and place your hand on that person’s shoulder.
The more attractive the stranger, the greater the imperative to use a condom. Marry at least twice. Forgo social media.
The streets you walk, the food you eat, the job you work, the method of transportation you choose, the beauty products you purchase, the shows you watch, the links you click, the way you sit on a train, the way you speak to waiters, the way you take your coffee—everything affects everyone. Find a way to believe this, even when sober. Do not let your children become casualties of your damage. Do not have children if you cannot ensure the above.
I was gazing into a fish tank from my wheelchair, seeing myself in the glass, seeing America in the fish, who were busy and doomed and theistic.
Rehab, by some measures, was the best time of my life. I am still haunted by what my son said to me on the balcony, during my sixtieth birthday party: Here you are with your five-hundred-dollar cake, and still you want to jump.
I don’t think I ever saw her consume anything other than spicy ramen, spicy chips, spicy seaweed, and big green leaves.
Thinking too much can zap you dead, and Blandine—she just shuts herself in rooms and thinks. Thinks and thinks and thinks herself into all kinds of doom, and by sundown she’s afraid of the doorknob.
Moses checks his phone the way a regular person would.
He comes upon a photo of a lush park whose splendor appears accidental in context, like the only beautiful child in a family of ten.
Like many high school music teachers, James never wanted to be a high school music teacher.
Addicted to learning because it distracts her from the hostility of her consciousness; she has one of those brains that attacks itself unless it’s completing a difficult task.
“See, it’s this medication I’m on,” says one to the other. “It does this to my skin.” “What?” “Look at me. It’s like my face is falling off my face.”
“Les deux. Tum ex illis.”
Nothing counts. It’s all sudoku, a controlled experiment, a relentless series of practice tests.
longs to amass information until his education becomes the inverse of itself, until he is absolutely stupid with knowledge.
He will hypostatize her to his life, and hypostatize his life to her, and then they will retreat to their barricaded realms, and all will be well. All will have always been well.
so much wealth in a desert of taste.
a cautious laugh—the laugh of an adult who was constantly hushed as a child.
She did bring a book, but she wasn’t reading it, just bullying the ink into sense.
no one is spared the primal dispossession of psychosexual pressures. Not even the geniuses.”
That a place called Lover’s Hollow existed within a place called Chastity Valley gave Blandine some hope about human resilience in the face of human brutality.
Plagued by self-criticism, shyness, bouts of depression, and a religious conviction that self-confidence was hubris,
The factories pollute the air with their history, just as they once polluted it with dark chemical smoke. The price of overabundance.
We will invade you with all of our nothing, the factories say, because it’s all we have left.
He sees the youngest boy tugging at her skirt, saying, Mama, Mama, look at this, look what I can do, Mama, look at me. He sees her refusing to see him, reserving her beautiful, solemn attention for the fake paper world in her hands.
baptized in binary waters of worship and disgust. You’re perfect. You’re doing everything wrong. Hush. Speak up. You’re clever. You pretty little idiot. Show us your dance. Hold still. Give us a song. Be quiet. Imitate. Be an original. You’re just like her, and her, and her. Dazzle us. Don’t draw attention to yourself. All eyes on you. You’re not the center of the universe. You’re perfect. What’s wrong with you?
She did not like the ocean and accused people of bragging when they claimed to love it.
All she felt, when she looked at the ocean, was the presence of the absence of awe.
to make their power visible and their efforts invisible.
Women should be priests. Priests should get married if they want, have kids if they want. Folks of all genders and sexualities should be welcomed exactly as they are. Abuse should be condemned. Birth control should be encouraged. I mean, the last thing our burning planet needs right now is a population boom of industrial appetites. These are easy things, obvious things, unavoidably right and good, and yet I’ve come to believe that they’re never going to happen within this decaying institution.
The word stands for the body, but the symphony stands for the spirit.
The soul is not in the body; the body is in the soul.
It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism,
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just…I want a life that’s a little more lifelike,” Blandine says. “Don’t you?”
Security, fulfillment, euphoria. Love. These feelings, she discovered, could last until they became conditions.
