Abominations: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-Destruction

by Lionel Shriver

Ms. Abdel-Magied went on, “As I stood up, my heart began to race. I could feel the eyes of the hundreds of audience members on my back: questioning, querying, judging. . . . The faces around me blurred. As my heels thudded against the grey plastic of the flooring, harmonizing with the beat of the adrenaline pumping through my veins, my mind was blank save for one question. ‘How is this happening?’”

With similar deference to a referent’s humanity, “the obese” has given way to the prolix “people living with obesity,” as if all that excess weight is merely renting a spare bedroom down the hall. Yet the logic of this prohibition taints any noun that refers to a person. If I’m a “Londoner” or a “libertarian,” is that all I am? Aren’t these words, by identifying me via a mere location or creed, reductive?

Given that butchers and bakers and candlestick makers cannot, in their essence, be distilled to their professions, perhaps we should say instead “butchering people” and “baking people” and “people of candlestick making.”

I might note that Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA, and more broadly Northern Irish nationalists—who all seemed back in the day to treasure their grievances far more than their aspirations to a united Ireland—basically invented identity politics. The obsession with language, the supersensitivity, the preening sanctimony, the attachment to victimhood: Northern nationalists got there way before American college students.

I inhabit the attic of a ramshackle Victorian manor that looms at the end of a potholed cul-de-sac. Slanted ceilings shaft every side of my top floor, cutting the rooms where we gathered into odd shapes whose lopsided skew seemed apt.

(accidentally in the right, but stodgy, straitlaced, po-faced dullards you would never ask over for a drink)

deeply held prejudice always presents itself to its custodian as plain fact.

too much sanctimony makes for an excessively rich intellectual diet. Indignation clogs the arteries and makes your mind slow and fat.

During brief, intoxicating periods of hitting at the top of your game, the mental cacophony quiets, and there’s no longer any space between “telling yourself” to do something and doing it. This flow state seems like not thinking. In fact, it is perfect thinking.

in The Book of Friendship, Aristotle divided amity into three camps: friendships of “utility,” of “pleasure,” and of “excellence.” Similarly, the twelfth-century abbot Aelred of Rievaulx distinguished between “carnal” friendships based on “hope of gain” or “mutual harmony in vice,” as opposed to “true” friendships.