Curiosity Over Judgement Quotes

When I was in high school I had to write an essay duplicating the manner and subject of Bacon’s ‘On Reading,’ and I remember including all the comfortable clichés. I said nothing about how books made me masturbate. I said nothing about nightmares, about daydreaming, about aching, cock-stiffening loneliness. I said something about wonder and curiosity, the improvement of character, quickening of sensibility, enlargement of mind, but nothing about the disappearance of the self in a terrible quake of earth. I did not say that reading drove a knife into the body. I did not say that as the man at breakfast calmly spoons his oatmeal into his mouth while words pass woundlessly through his eyes, he divides more noisily than chewing, becomes a gulf, a Red Sea none shall pass over, dry-shod across. There is no miracle more menacing than that one. I did not write about the slow return from a story like the ebb of a fever, the unique quality it conferred which set you apart from others as though touched by the gods. I did not write about the despair of not willing to be oneself or the contrary despair of total entelechy. I did not write about reading as a refuge, a toy drug, a pitiless judgement.

Miyata was fluent and intelligent. Nothing was beyond his curiosity. He seemed to be above the confusion of life, as if he had been commissioned to spend his own in undisturbed judgement of the world about him, protected always by a mandate from the gods. They spoke briefly of Korea and then of the past war with the United States. Miyata had been in Japan for its entire duration and must have been deeply affected, but when he talked about it, it was without bitterness. Wars were not of his doing. He considered them almost poetically, as if they were seasons, the cruel winters of man, even though almost all the work he had done in the 1930s and early 1940s had been lost when his house was burned in the great incendiary raid of 1944. He described the night vividly, the endless hours, the bombers thundering low over the storms of fire.

Politically correct sexuality is a paradoxical concept. One of the most deeply held opinions in feminism is that women should be autonomous and self-directed in defining their sexual desire, yet when a woman says “This is my desire,” feminists rush in to say, “No, no, it is the prick in your head; women should not desire that act.” But we do not yet know enough about what women– any women– desire. The real problem here is that we stopped asking questions too early in the lesbian and feminist movement, and rushed to erect what appeared to be answers into the formidable and rigid edifice that we have now. Our contemporary lack of curiosity also affects our view of the past. We don’t ask butch-femme women who they are; we tell them. We don’t explore the social life of working-class lesbian bars in the 1940’s and 1950’s; we simply assert that all those women were victims. Our supposed answers closed our ears and stopped our analysis. Questions and answers about lesbian lives that deviate from the feminist model of the 1970’s strike like a shock wave against the movement’s foundation, yet this new wave of questioning is an authentic one, coming from women who have helped create the feminist and lesbian movement that they are now challenging into new growth. If we close down exploration, we will be forcing some women once again to live their sexual lives in a land of shame and guilt, only this time they will be haunted by the realization that it was not the patriarchal code they had failed, but the creed of their own sisters who said they came in love. Curiosity builds bridges between women and between the present and past; judgement builds the power if some over others. Curiosity is not trivial; it is respect one life pays to another. It is a largeness of mind and heart that refuses to be bound by decorum or by desperation. It is hardest to keep alive in the times it is most needed, the times of hatred, of instability, of attack. Surely these are such times.