More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
A man was a man was a man. He bent nature to his will. He did not submit to it, except in death.
writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising.
Even more befuddling, to a writer like me, is that the values normally associated with those words on a page—submission, negative; resistance, positive—cannot be relied upon out in the field.
Death comes to all—but in America it has long been considered reasonable to offer the best chance of delay to the highest bidder.
Why should we suppose that we can attain our aims in peace—food, clothing, homes, education, leisure, social security and full employment for all—by putting private interests first?”
even if you believe in the potential political efficacy of art—as I do—few artists would dare count on its timeliness.
But isn’t it the case that everybody finds their capabilities returning to them, even if it’s only the capacity to mourn what we have lost? We had delegated so much.
What a dry, sad, small idea of a life. And how exposed it looks, now that the people I love are in the same room to witness the way I do time. The way I’ve done it all my life.
Trying to preserve some “space for yourself” in the crowded domestic sphere feels like obsessively cupping your hands around thin air. You carve it out, the time you need, after much anxiety and debate, and get into the separate space and look between your hands and there it is—nothing. An empty victory.
There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do. They are no substitute for love.
Here is this novel, made with love. Here is this banana bread, made with love. If it weren’t for this habit of indirection, of course, there would be no culture in this world, and very little meaningful pleasure for any of us. Although the most powerful art, it sometimes seems to me, is an experience and a going-through; it is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself, and for this reason has perhaps been more frequently created by people who feel themselves to be completely alone in this world—and therefore wholly focused on the task at hand—than by those
...more
Married men are confronted with the infinite reality of their wives, who cannot now be exchanged, even mentally, for a strange girl walking down the street. Her face, her face, her face. Your face, your face, your face.
The single mother with the single child finds the role of child and adult passing fluidly around their small, shared space, with more ease and fluctuation than either party had ever thought possible. The widower enters a second widowhood. The pensioner an early twilight. Everybody learns the irrelevance of these matters next to “real suffering.”
Suffering applies itself directly to its subject and will not be shamed out of itself or eradicated by righteous argument, no matter how objectively correct that argument may be.
Everyone has an anecdote about privilege they like to tell, a moment when they realized they, or somebody else, were seeing through a veil of assumption and/or relative ignorance.
But when the bad day in your week finally arrives—and it comes to all—by which I mean, that particular moment when your sufferings, as puny as they may be in the wider scheme of things, direct themselves absolutely and only to you, as if precisely designed to destroy you and only you, at that point it might be worth allowing yourself the admission of the reality of suffering, if not for yourself, exactly, then in preparation for that next painful bout of videoconferencing, so that you don’t roll your eyes or laugh or puke while listening to what some other person seems to think is pain.
I always tell my students: “A style is a means of insisting on something.” A line of Sontag’s.
The statement, The police are investigating this as a hate crime always prompts in me the query: when it comes to murder, what other kind of crime is there? I realize that’s banal but I can’t help it.
what is it like to have a mind-on-fire at such a moment? Do you feel ever more distant from the world? Or has the world, in its new extremity, finally come to you?
A long-preserved isolation—even if it has been forced—is painful to emerge from.
the truth is that not enough carriers of this virus have ever been willing to risk the potential loss of any aspect of their social capital to find out what kind of America might lie on the other side of segregation.
Has America metabolized contempt? Has it lived with the virus so long that it no longer fears it? Is there a strong enough desire for a different America within America?
Real change would involve a broad recognition that the fatalist, essentialist race discourse we often employ as a superficial cure for the symptoms of this virus manages, in practice, to smoothly obscure the fact that the DNA of this virus is economic at base.
When in the presence of a child, get on the floor. Or else bend down until your own and the child’s eyes meet. Mothering is an art. Housekeeping is an art. Gardening is an art. Baking is an art. Those of us who have no natural gifts in these areas—or perhaps no interest—too easily dismiss them. Making small talk is an art, and never to be despised just because you yourself dread making it. Knowing all your neighbors’ names is an art. Sending cards at holidays, to everybody you know—this, too, is an art. But above all these: playing. The tales of adult women who still know how to play with
...more