Distinguished Woman Quotes

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W. I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.

[I]f we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.

We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it. Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking. Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light is her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.

While she is lovely, we need to remember that her face is not what distinguishes her. Her beauty is a reflection of the virtue and talent she keeps inside.

Do you suppose a woman knows why she loves? Does she select? Does she say to herself, 'Go to! here is a distinguished statesman with presidential possibilities; I shall proceed to fall in love with him.' or, 'I shall set my heart upon this musician, whose fame is on every tongue?' or 'this financier, who controls the world's money markets?

Thirty years on, femininity is still compulsory for women—and has become an option for men—while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity. Meanwhile, the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character.

Let us define our terms. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac, she is simply a woman in love. But my friend who xeroxes his love letters so he can publish them someday--my friend is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's immediate family); it is a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In this sense the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is the result of the passion, not the passion itself. "Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions: 1. a high degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities; 2. an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual; 3. a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (In this connection I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi [character from the book] was absolutely right when she claimed never to have experienced anything from the outside. It is this absence of content, this void, that powers the moter driving her to write). "But the effect transmits a kind of flashback to the cause. If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.

The child comes home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn’t got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. I am merely pointing to something which is different from love but which sometimes goes by the name of love. It may well be that without this thing which I am talking about there would not be any love. But this thing in itself is not love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When you got born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can’t get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

Miriam thought her the most entitled white women she had met—uninteresting, her life so intertwined with that of her husband’s that she was no longer distinguishable as a woman.

It's forbidden to bite a woman's arse. In the absence of a legal precedent, the Imams decided to apply human law to the guilty monkey, whoever it turned out to be. They narrowed it down to Bosco or Shin Bone. The victim was unable to distinguish one monkey from the other.

Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate or cruel man might do, given unlimited power over a woman, then anything that you can bring yourself to suspect was what became routine in ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School that became the headquarters of the business. I talked to Dr. Emilio Mignone, a distinguished physician whose daughter Monica had disappeared into the precincts of that hellish place. What do you find to say to a doctor and a humanitarian who has been gutted by the image of a starving rat being introduced to his daughter's genitalia? Like hell itself the school was endorsed and blessed by priests, in case any stray consciences needed to be stilled.

In the University of Compassion women are the most distinguished professors.

We have lost the invaluable faculty of being shocked—a faculty which has hitherto almost distinguished the Man or Woman from the beast or the child.

I WANT her though, to take the same from me. She touches me as if I were herself, her own. She has not realized yet, that fearful thing, that I am the other, she thinks we are all of one piece. It is painfully untrue. I want her to touch me at last, ah, on the root and quick of my darkness and perish on me, as I have perished on her. Then, we shall be two and distinct, we shall have each our separate being. And that will be pure existence, real liberty. Till then, we are confused, a mixture, unresolved, unextricated one from the other. It is in pure, unutterable resolvedness, distinction of being, that one is free, not in mixing, merging, not in similarity. When she has put her hand on my secret, darkest sources, the darkest outgoings, when it has struck home to her, like a death, "this is _him!_" she has no part in it, no part whatever, it is the terrible _other_, when she knows the fearful _other flesh_, ah, dark- ness unfathomable and fearful, contiguous and concrete, when she is slain against me, and lies in a heap like one outside the house, when she passes away as I have passed away being pressed up against the _other_, then I shall be glad, I shall not be confused with her, I shall be cleared, distinct, single as if burnished in silver, having no adherence, no adhesion anywhere, one clear, burnished, isolated being, unique, and she also, pure, isolated, complete, two of us, unutterably distinguished, and in unutterable conjunction. Then we shall be free, freer than angels, ah, perfect. VIII AFTER that, there will only remain that all men detach themselves and become unique, that we are all detached, moving in freedom more than the angels, conditioned only by our own pure single being, having no laws but the laws of our own being. Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled. Every movement will be direct. Only to be will be such delight, we cover our faces when we think of it lest our faces betray us to some untimely fiend. Every man himself, and therefore, a surpassing singleness of mankind. The blazing tiger will spring upon the deer, un-dimmed, the hen will nestle over her chickens, we shall love, we shall hate, but it will be like music, sheer utterance, issuing straight out of the unknown, the lightning and the rainbow appearing in us unbidden, unchecked, like ambassadors. We shall not look before and after. We shall _be_, _now_. We shall know in full. We, the mystic NOW. (From the poem the Manifesto)

But if there is to be a fifth wave of feminism, I would hope that the main thing that distinguishes it from all that came before is that women counter the awkwardness, disconnect, and bullshit of being a modern woman not by shouting at it, internalizing it, or squabbling about it - but by simply pointing at it and going "HA!" instead.

Every decision I have made - from changing jobs, to changing partners, to changing homes - has been taken with trepidation. I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as a part of life, specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown, and I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back, turn back, you'll die if you venture too far... In the past several years I have learned, in short, to trust myself. Not to eradicate fear but to go on in spite of fear. Not to become insensitive to distinguished critics but to follow my own writer's instinct. My job is not to paralyze myself by anticipating judgment but to do the best that I can and let judgment fall where it may. The difference between the woman who is writing this essay and the college girl sitting in her creative writing class in 1961 is mostly a matter of nerve and daring - the nerve to trust my own instincts and the daring to be a fool. No one ever found wisdom without being a fool.

Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.

She was a tall woman with big bones and a noble face, dark eyebrows and a neatly folded jowl. She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag.

The capacity for logical thought is one of the things that makes us human. But in a world of ubiquitous information and advanced analytical tools, logic alone won't do. What will distinguish those who thrive will be their ability to understand what makes their fellow woman or man tick, to forge relationships, and to care for others.

My daughter accepted without comment the fact that she wasn't going to age. The peculiar thing about the whole business in her case was the fact that she really didn't. Beldin and the twins and I had all achieved the appearance of a certain maturity. We picked up wrinkles and grey hair and a distinguished look. Pol didn't...I guess a sorcerer is supposed to look distinguished and wise, and that implies wrinkles and grey hair. A woman with grey hair and wrinkles is called a crone, and I don't think Pol would have liked that very much. Maybe we all wound up looking the way we thought we ought to look. My brothers and I thought we should look wise and venerable. Pol didn't mind the wise part, but "venerable" wasn't in her vocabulary. I might want to investigate that someday. The notion that we somehow create ourselves in intriguing.

The spotlight hadn’t dimmed as Molly aged but had changed its glow instead. It had grown more intense with each new experience, had become more personalized and distinguished. It was no longer the bland whitish light of youth, a light dictated by a ceaselessly shallow society and therefore able to be seen by everyone in such a society. No, hers at present was a spotlight with highly individualized rays that could no longer be seen by most men simply because most men’s eyes weren’t good enough to see them.

The disgust of distinguished people for snobs who want to force themselves upon them, the virile man has for the invert, the woman for every man who is too much in love with her.

Work done off the paid job is looked down upon if not ignored. autonomous activity threatens the employment level, generates deviance, and detracts​ from the GNP...Work no longer means the creation of a value perceived by the worker but mainly a job, which is a social relationship. Unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for one's neighbour. An active woman who runs a house and brings up children and takes in those of others is distinguished from a woman who 'works,' no matter how useless or damaging the product of this work might be.

The Human was extremely tall. On its head it had yellowish hair coiled like a rope. It had no hair on its face. And yet his grandmother had been very categorical about that. Humans have hair on their faces. Its called a beard. Its one of the many things that distinguish them from elves. The little elf concentrated, trying to remember, then it came to him. "You must be a female man," he concluded triumphantly. "The word is woman, fool," said the human. "Oh, sorry, sorry, woman-fool, I be more careful, I call right name, woman-fool"....

As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself without any need for mediation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman touches herself all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so... ~from Red Queen Black Queen

A distinguished woman is never a follower—she is always a leader—and you, Mary, are a distinguished woman.

Humph! tell your Aunt Agatha, Harry, not to bother me any more with her charity appeals. I am sick of them. Why, the good woman thinks that I have nothing to do but to write cheques for her silly fads.” “All right, Uncle George, I’ll tell her, but it won’t have any effect. Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.

I believe it often happens that a man, before he has quite made up his own mind, will distinguish the sister or intimate friend of the woman he is really thinking of more than the woman herself.

Perhaps one unspoken reason why many have been so reluctant to apply the term “torture” to slavery is that even though they denied slavery’s economic dynamism, they knew that slavery on the cotton frontier made a lot of product. No one was willing, in other words, to admit that they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture.52 Yet we should call torture by its name. Historians of torture have defined the term as extreme torment that is part of a judicial or inquisitorial process. The key feature that distinguishes it from mere sadistic behavior is supposedly that torture aims to extract “truth.” But the scale and slate and lash did, in fact, continually extract a truth: the maximum poundage that a man, woman, or child could pick.

Why,” went on Edna, clasping her knees and looking up into Mademoiselle’s twisted face, “do you suppose a woman knows why she loves? Does she select? Does she say to herself: ‘Go to! Here is a distinguished statesman with presidential possibilities; I shall proceed to fall in love with him.’ Or, ‘I shall set my heart upon this musician, whose fame is on every tongue?’ Or, ‘This financier, who controls the world’s money markets?

I see the future. It is there, poised over the street, hardly more dim than the present. What advantage will accrue from its realisation? The old woman stumps further and further away, she stops, pulls at a grey lock of hair which escapes from her handkerchief. She walks, she was there, now she is here... I don't know where I am any more: do i see her motions, or do I foresee them? I can no longer distinguish present from future and yet it lasts, it happens little by little; the old woman advances in the deserted street, shuffling her heavy, mannish brogues. This is time, time laid bare, coming slowly into existence, keeping us waiting, and when it does come making us sick because we realise it's been there for a long time. The old woman reaches the corner of the street, no more than a bundle of black clothes. All right then, it's new, she wasn't there a little while ago. But it's a tarnished deflowered newness, which can never surprise. She is going to turn the corner, she turns - during an eternity.

Spiritual discernment involves using God’s Word as the standard for distinguishing and separating ideas and behaviors. It distinguishes and separates truth from falsehood, darkness from light, healthy from unhealthy, sound from unsound, and good from evil, based on the Bible’s plumb line.

It doesn't matter how rich or poor a person is, what gender or social class, or how much fame or education she possesses. Verbal, mental, and physical abuse can happen to anyone. It doesn't matter what a woman’s ethnicity is because the only distinguishing color of abuse is black-and-blue.

Sexism is clearly not the continuation of patriarchal power relations in modern societies. Rather, it is a hitherto unthinkable individual degradation of one-half of humanity on a socio-biological grounds. The lower prestige assigned by patriarchal societies (of the Mediterranean or of any other type) must therefore be carefully distinguished from the personal degradation of each individual woman who, under the regime of sex, is forced to compete with men.

What is the use of beauty in woman? Provided a woman is physically well made and capable of bearing children, she will always be good enough in the opinion of economists. What is the use of music? -- of painting? Who would be fool enough nowadays to prefer Mozart to Carrel, Michael Angelo to the inventor of white mustard? There is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use. Everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and man's needs are low and disgusting, like his own poor, wretched nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet. For my part, saving these gentry's presence, I am of those to whom superfluities are necessaries, and I am fond of things and people in inverse ratio to the service they render me. I prefer a Chinese vase with its mandarins and dragons, which is perfectly useless to me, to a utensil which I do use, and the particular talent of mine which I set most store by is that which enables me not to guess logogriphs and charades. I would very willingly renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a citizen for the sight of an undoubted painting by Raphael, or of a beautiful nude woman, -- Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for Canova, or Julia Grisi when she is entering her bath. I would most willingly consent to the return of that cannibal, Charles X., if he brought me, from his residence in Bohemia, a case of Tokai or Johannisberg; and the electoral laws would be quite liberal enough, to my mind, were some of our streets broader and some other things less broad. Though I am not a dilettante, I prefer the sound of a poor fiddle and tambourines to that of the Speaker's bell. I would sell my breeches for a ring, and my bread for jam. The occupation which best befits civilized man seems to me to be idleness or analytically smoking a pipe or cigar. I think highly of those who play skittles, and also of those who write verse. You may perceive that my principles are not utilitarian, and that I shall never be the editor of a virtuous paper, unless I am converted, which would be very comical. Instead of founding a Monthyon prize for the reward of virtue, I would rather bestow -- like Sardanapalus, that great, misunderstood philosopher -- a large reward to him who should invent a new pleasure; for to me enjoyment seems to be the end of life and the only useful thing on this earth. God willed it to be so, for he created women, perfumes, light, lovely flowers, good wine, spirited horses, lapdogs, and Angora cats; for He did not say to his angels, 'Be virtuous,' but, 'Love,' and gave us lips more sensitive than the rest of the skin that we might kiss women, eyes looking upward that we might behold the light, a subtile sense of smell that we might breathe in the soul of the flowers, muscular limbs that we might press the flanks of stallions and fly swift as thought without railway or steam-kettle, delicate hands that we might stroke the long heads of greyhounds, the velvety fur of cats, and the polished shoulder of not very virtuous creatures, and, finally, granted to us alone the triple and glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, striking fire, and making love in all seasons, whereby we are very much more distinguished from brutes than by the custom of reading newspapers and framing constitutions.

Sylvia Plath's greatest poetry was sometimes conceived while she was baking bread, she was such a perfectionist and ultimately such a fool. The trouble is, of course, that the role of the goddess, the role of the glory and the grandeur of the female in the universe exists in the fantasy of the male artist and no woman can ever draw it to her heart for comfort, but the role of menial, unfortunately, is real and that she knows because she tastes it everyday. So the barbaric yawp of utter adoration for the power and the glory and the grandeur of the female in the universe is uttered at the expense of the particular living woman every time. And because we can be neither one nor the other with any piece of mind, because we are unfortunately improper goddesses and unwilling menials, there is a battle waged between us. And after all, in the description of this battle, maybe I find the justification of my idea that the achievement of the male artistic ego is at my expense for I find that the battle is dearer to him than the peace would ever be. The eternal battle with women, he boasts, sharpens our resistance, develops our strength, enlarges the scope of our cultural achievements. So is the scope after all worth it? Again, the same question, just as if we were talking of the income of a thousand families for a whole year. You see, I strongly suspect that when this revolution takes place, art will no longer be distinguished by its rarity, or its expense, or its inaccessibility, or the extraordinary way which in it is marketed, it will be the prerogative of all of us and we will do it as those artists did whom Freud understood not at all, the artists who made the Cathedral of Chartres or the mosaics of Byzantine, the artist who had no ego and no name.

For a woman of such intelligence and wit, surely it is beneath her dignity to parade herself in front of the most distinguished of men, in hopes of a few morsels of attention.

I always wear my wedding ring. It's my trademark.

Unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for one's neighbor. An active woman who runs a house and brings up children and takes in those of others is distinguished from a woman who 'works', no matter how useless or damaging the product of this work might be. Activity, effort, achievement, or service outside a hierarchical relationship and unmeasured by professional standards, threatens a commodity-intensive society. The generation of use-values that escape effective measurement limits not only the need for more commodities but also the jobs that create them and the paycheques needed to buy them.

My period continued, an inevitable cycle, yet every month I was somehow surprised by the violent pain. It was as if I refused to believe my body, something I’d trusted for years, would repeatedly betray me. My stomach ate itself from the inside, a revelry I had been dragged to, a feast I was forced to join though I was not hungry. The meal lasted four to six days, gorging on cramps, the spilled crumbs falling out of me stained with raspberry jam. My stomach was never a clean eater, gnawing on my uterus and fallopian tubes, leaving bite marks. I counted each rotation of the sun with heightening anxiety until it passed and I reset the clock. The knife carved my insides into pot roasts; the fork jabbed my sides into holey cheese. I could distinguish each fork prong—the pain was profound. My guts twisted around the spoon like spaghetti, tangled noodles slathered in scarlet marinara. Menstruation was more smashed acidic tomatoes than sweet fruit compote. I wiped my fingers on white jeans made of napkins and left streaks dried to rust. The stains came out with bleach and detergent. I died and regenerated every month. How else could I define the experience? The reasonable explanation was death. I decided when my body was wheeled into the morgue, the coroner would declare I died of being a woman. Which was far better than dying of being a man.

Henry believes he knows exactly when the ninety-four-year-old woman in the neighbouring apartment dies. He hears her turn off. Until now he has not been able to distinguish her from her appliances – her washing machine, her vacuum cleaner, her radiators, her television. But the moment she gives up the ghost he detects the cessation of a noise of which he was not previously aware. A hum, was it? A whirr? Impossible to say. There is no word for the sound a life makes.

Far from polarizing male and female--as patriarchal definitions do-- or highlighting gender distinctions between them (none of which are mentioned here), God's method in creating the woman unites them in a bone level solidarity. When the man sees the woman, he doesn't distinguish himself from her. He sees a reflection of himself. She is literally bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh perfectly re-engineered into a woman. The oneness between God's male and female image bearers is unmistakable and utterly profound.

In the woodblock prints of the Genroku period one often finds the features of a pair of lovers to be surprisingly similar, with little to distinguish the man from the woman. The universal ideal of beauty in Greek sculpture likewise approaches a close resemblance between the male and female. Might this not be one of the secrets of love? Might it not be that through the innermost recesses of love there courses an unattainable longing in which both the man and the woman desire to become the exact image of the other? Might not this longing drive them on, leading at last to a tragic reaction in which they seek to attain the impossible by going to the opposite extreme? In short, since their mutual love cannot achieve a perfection of mutual identity, is there not a mental process whereby each of them tries instead to emphasize their points of dissimilarity—the man his manliness and the woman her womanliness—and uses this very revolt as a form of coquetry toward the other? Or if they do achieve a similarity, it unfortunately lasts for only a fleeting moment of illusion. Because, as the girl becomes more bold and the boy more shy, there comes an instant at which they pass each other going in opposite directions, overshooting their mark and passing on beyond to some point where the mark no longer exists.

How different this world to the one about which I used to read, and in which I used to live! This is one peopled by demons, phantoms, vampires, ghouls, boggarts, and nixies. Names of things of which I knew nothing are now so familiar that the creatures themselves appear to have real existence. The Arabian Nights are not more fantastic than our gospels; and Lempriere would have found ours a more marvelous world to catalog than the classical mythical to which he devoted his learning. Ours is a world of luprachaun and clurichaune, deev and cloolie, and through the maze of mystery I have to thread my painful way, now learning how to distinguish oufe from pooka, and nis from pixy; study long screeds upon the doings of effreets and dwergers, or decipher the dwaul of delirious monks who have made homunculi from refuse. Waking or sleeping, the image of some uncouth form is always present to me. What would I not give for a volume by the once despised 'A. L. O. E' or prosy Emma Worboise? Talk of the troubles of Winifred Bertram or Jane Eyre, what are they to mine? Talented authoresses do not seem to know that however terrible it may be to have as a neighbour a mad woman in a tower, it is much worse to have to live in a kitchen with a crocodile. This elementary fact has escaped the notice of writers of fiction; the re-statement of it has induced me to reconsider my decision as to the most longed-for book; my choice now is the Swiss Family Robinson. In it I have no doubt I should find how to make even the crocodile useful, or how to kill it, which would be still better. ("Mysterious Maisie")

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W. "I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.

We understand the characters of people who do not interest us; how can we ever grasp that of a person who is an intimate part of our existence, whom after a little we no longer distinguish in any way from ourselves, whose motives provide us with an inexhaustible supply of anxious hypotheses which we perpetually reconstruct. Springing from somewhere beyond our understanding, our curiosity as to the woman whom we love overleaps the bounds of that woman’s character, which we might if we chose but probably will not choose to stop and examine.

The woman who engaged him had no idea that her gardener was one of the most distinguished scientists in Britain until a friend came for tea one day and, looking out the window, casually asked: “My dear, why is the Nobel laureate Sir Lawrence Bragg pruning your hedges?” Late

C.-C.: My dear Arnold, we all hope that you have before you a distinguished political career. You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency. ARNOLD: But supposing it doesn't come off? Women are incalculable. C.-C.: Nonsense! Men are romantic. A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self-indulgence. ARNOLD: I never know whether you're a humorist or a cynic, father. C.-C.: I'm neither, my dear boy; I'm merely a very truthful man. But people are so unused to the truth that they're apt to mistake it for a joke or a sneer.

They zoom in on the one visible sex difference that is found throughout the animal kingdom: male movements tend to be more brusque and resolute than those of females, which are more flowing and supple. We don’t even need to see whole bodies to make this distinction. When scientists attached little lights to the arms, legs, and pelvis of people and filmed them walking, they found that these dots alone contain all the information we need to distinguish gender.2 From watching just a few moving white specks against a dark background, subjects can tell right away if they are looking at a man or a woman. The walking pattern even varies with the stage of a woman’s ovulatory cycle.

Just as Clara Gazul is the female pseudonym of a distinguished male writer, George Sand the masculine pseudonym of a woman of genius, so Camille Maupin was the mask behind which was long hidden a charming young woman, very well-born, a Breton, named Felicite des Touches, the person who was now causing such lively anxiety to the Baronne du Guenic and the excellent rector of Guerande.

One understands then why woman has no sexual parts, properly speaking. It is because she is herself a sexual part - a sexual part of man, to cumbersome for him to carry around permanently and therefore deposited outside himself for most of the time and taken up when needed. Moreover the quality that distinguishes man from animals is this very power of equipping himself at any moment with an instrument, tool or arm that he needs, but that he can get rid of straight away, whereas the lobster has to drag his two pincers about with him everywhere. And just as mans hand is a sort of grappling hook that enables him to grasp a hammer, sword or fountain pen according to his needs, so his sex is the sort of grappling hook of the sexual parts rather than the sexual part itslef.

The decades that she devoted to conserving her husband’s legacy made Eliza only more militantly loyal to his memory, and there was one injury she could never forget: the exposure of the Maria Reynolds affair, for which she squarely blamed James Monroe. In the 1820s, after Monroe had completed two terms as president, he called upon Eliza in Washington, D.C., hoping to thaw the frost between them. Eliza was then about seventy and staying at her daughter’s home. She was sitting in the backyard with her fifteen-year-old nephew when a maid emerged and presented the ex-president’s card. Far from being flattered by this distinguished visitor, Eliza was taken aback. “She read the name and stood holding the card, much perturbed,” said her nephew. “Her voice sank and she spoke very low, as she always did when she was angry. ‘What has that man come to see me for?’” The nephew said that Monroe must have stopped by to pay his respects. She wavered. “I will see him,” she finally agreed. So the small woman with the upright carriage and the sturdy, determined step marched stiffly into the house. When she entered the parlor, Monroe rose to greet her. Eliza then did something out of character and socially unthinkable: she stood facing the ex-president but did not invite him to sit down. With a bow, Monroe began what sounded like a well-rehearsed speech, stating “that it was many years since they had met, that the lapse of time brought its softening influences, that they both were nearing the grave, when past differences could be forgiven and forgotten.” Eliza saw that Monroe was trying to draw a moral equation between them and apportion blame equally for the long rupture in their relationship. Even at this late date, thirty years after the fact, she was not in a forgiving mood. “Mr. Monroe,” she told him, “if you have come to tell me that you repent, that you are sorry, very sorry, for the misrepresentations and the slanders and the stories you circulated against my dear husband, if you have come to say this, I understand it. But otherwise, no lapse of time, no nearness to the grave, makes any difference.” Monroe took in this rebuke without comment. Stunned by the fiery words delivered by the elderly little woman in widow’s weeds, the ex-president picked up his hat, bid Eliza good day, and left the house, never to return.

Let but a single real feature—the little that one distinguishes of a woman seen from afar or from behind—enable us to project the form of beauty before our eyes, we imagine that we have seen her before, our heart beats, we hasten in pursuit, and will always remain half-persuaded that it was she, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake.

The Winding Stair My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair; Set all your mind upon the steep ascent, Upon the broken, crumbling battlement, Upon the breathless starlit air, 'Upon the star that marks the hidden pole; Fix every wandering thought upon That quarter where all thought is done: Who can distinguish darkness from the soul My Self. The consecretes blade upon my knees Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was, Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass Unspotted by the centuries; That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn From some court-lady's dress and round The wodden scabbard bound and wound Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war? Think of ancestral night that can, If but imagination scorn the earth And intellect is wandering To this and that and t'other thing, Deliver from the crime of death and birth. My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it Five hundred years ago, about it lie Flowers from I know not what embroidery - Heart's purple - and all these I set For emblems of the day against the tower Emblematical of the night, And claim as by a soldier's right A charter to commit the crime once more. My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows And falls into the basin of the mind That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind, For intellect no longer knows Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known - That is to say, ascends to Heaven; Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue's a stone. II My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? What matter if I live it all once more? Endure that toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain Brought face to face with his own clumsiness; The finished man among his enemies? - How in the name of Heaven can he escape That defiling and disfigured shape The mirror of malicious eyes Casts upon his eyes until at last He thinks that shape must be his shape? And what's the good of an escape If honour find him in the wintry blast? I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, A blind man battering blind men; Or into that most fecund ditch of all, The folly that man does Or must suffer, if he woos A proud woman not kindred of his soul. I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest

are much more beautiful in body than women. It is only a man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulse that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race; for the whole beauty of the sex is bound up with this impulse. Instead of calling them beautiful there would be more warrant for describing women as the unesthetic sex. Neither for music, nor for poetry, nor for the fine arts, have they really and truly any sense of susceptibility; it is a mere mockery if they make a pretense of it in order to assist their endeavor to please... They are incapable of taking a purely objective interest in anything... The most distinguished intellects among the whole sex have never managed to produce a single achievement in the fine arts that is really genuine and original; or given to the world any work of permanent value in any sphere.[711] This veneration of women is a product of Christianity and of German sentimentality; and it is in turn a cause of that Romantic movement which exalts feeling, instinct and will above the intellect.[712] The Asiatics know better, and frankly recognize the inferiority of woman. "When the laws gave women equal rights with men, they ought also to have endowed them with masculine intellects.

Don't forget that not only was Socrates ugly but also that many famous women lovers did not distinguish themselves at all by their physical perfection. Aesthetic racism is almost always a sign of inexperience. Those who have not made their way far enough into the world of amorous delights judge women only by what can be seen. But those who really know women understand that the eye reveals only a minute fraction of what a woman can offer us

Oh, you cannot imagine (as I had never imagined) what these women of principle are! Charlotte, who did not notice the falsity of all the everyday conventions and rules of behavior, and foods, and books, and people she doted upon, would distinguish at once a false intonation in anything I might say with a view to keeping Lo near. She was like a musician who may be an odious vulgarian in ordinary life, devoid of tact and taste; but who will hear a false note in music with diabolical accuracy of judgment. To break Charlotte’s will, I would have to break her heart. If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too. If I said: “Either I have my way with Lolita, and you help me to keep the matter quiet, or we part at once,” she would have turned as pale as a woman of clouded glass and slowly replied: “All right, whatever you add or retract, this is the end.” And the end it would be.

As he approached his thirtieth birthday, Leonardo had established his genius but had remarkably little to show for it publicly. His only known artistic accomplishments were some brilliant but peripheral contributions to two Verrocchio paintings, a couple of devotional Madonnas that were hard to distinguish from others being produced in the workshop, a portrait of a young woman that he had not delivered, and two unfinished would-be masterpieces.

xxx it is not lack of wit or intellect that shallow men crave, it is lack of personality; they desire a woman who will exist only as a shadow to themselves, because this gives them the illusion that they have some importance, that they are more than cattle. Personality is what distinguishes us from each other, what makes each man and woman unique, and to submerge one’s personality is to make one’s self interchangeable, like a mass-produced commodity; xxx

She guessed that behind the conscious evil there was an unconscious blackness. That was what distinguished the earth’s children of darkness; they couldn’t make things but only break them. God the Creator had made man in His own image, and that meant that every man and woman who dwelt under God’s light was a creator of some kind, a person with an urge to stretch out his hand and shape the world into some rational pattern. The black man wanted—was able—only to unshape. Anti-Christ? You might as well say anti-creation.

She guessed that behind the conscious evil there was an unconscious blackness. That was what distinguished the earth's children of darkness; they couldn't make things but only break them. God the Creator had made man in His own image, and that meant that every man and woman who dwelt under God's light was a creator of some kind, a person with an urge to stretch out his hand and shape the world into some rational pattern. The black man wanted--was able--only to unshape. Anti-Christ? You might as well say anti-creation.

It’s not uncommon for distinguished French actresses to make their first films while still in their teens. Isabelle Adjani, Isabelle Carré, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Marie Gillain, Sophie Marceau, and Ludivine Sagnier—you’ll hear more about them later—all made an impression before their twentieth birthday. That teenage actresses can regularly, naturally and seamlessly move into adult roles is illustrative of French cinema’s way of seeing a woman’s life as all of a piece, as one smooth flow from childhood to youth to maturity to old age.

The Milesians did not model their women after Helen, reported to be the most beautiful woman of their times, & who, reportedly, had five husbands.Nor did they model their women after the Athenian housewives. Instead, Milesians celebrated womanly beauty from the physical endowments of two naked slave girls, Briseis & Chryseis-the bones of contention between Achilles & Agamemnon. Tradition cast Briseis as a tall brunette with a dark complexion & with a very distinguished appearance.Whilst Chryseis was described as fair, slender & small in stature.[INTRO]

These simple words reveal Rahab’s amazing destiny: Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab (Matthew 1:5). In other words, Salmone and Rahab were married and had a son. The Bible gives us a glimpse into Salmone’s background through several genealogies (1 Chronicles 2:11; Ruth 4:20–21). Clearly, he comes from a highly distinguished family in the house of Judah; his father Nahshon is the leader of the people of Judah, and his father’s sister is wife to Aaron (Numbers 2:3–4). Of Salmone’s own specific accomplishments and activities nothing is known. But the verse in Matthew is still shocking. How could a man who is practically a Jewish aristocrat, significant enough to get his name recorded in the Scriptures, marry a Canaanite woman who has earned her living entertaining gentlemen? Much of this novel deals with that question. Needless to say, this aspect of the story is purely fictional. We only know that Salmone married Rahab and had a son by her, and that Jesus Himself counts this Canaanite harlot as one of His ancestors. On how such a marriage came about or what obstacles it faced, the Bible is silent.

And of course the misuse of privilege is a much better thing to get people for than the things we used to get people for, like having children out of wedlock. But a great number of people who hadn’t just been in a train crash were now accusing a woman who had just been in a train crash of being privileged. The phrase ‘misuse of privilege’ was becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we chose to. It was becoming a devalued term, and was making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions.   •

In the end It will not matter That I was a woman. I am sure of it. The body is a source. Nothing more. There is a time for it. There is a certainty About the way it seeks its own dissolution. Consider rivers. They are always en route to Their own nothingness. From the first moment They are going home. And so When language cannot do it for us, Cannot make us know love will not diminish us, There are these phrases Of the ocean To console us. Particular and unafraid of their completion. In the end Everything that burdened and distinguished me Will be lost in this: I was a voice.

Young man,” he went on, raising his head again, “in your face I seem to read some trouble of mind. When you came in I read it, and that was why I addressed you at once. For in unfolding to you the story of my life, I do not wish to make myself a laughing-stock before these idle listeners, who indeed know all about it already, but I am looking for a man of feeling and education. Know then that my wife was educated in a high-class school for the daughters of noblemen, and on leaving, she danced the shawl dance before the governor and other personages for which she was presented with a gold medal and a certificate of merit. The medal … well, the medal of course was sold—long ago, hm … but the certificate of merit is in her trunk still and not long ago she showed it to our landlady. And although she is most continually on bad terms with the landlady, yet she wanted to tell some one or other of her past honours and of the happy days that are gone. I don’t condemn her for it. I don’t blame her, for the one thing left her is recollection of the past, and all the rest is dust and ashes. Yes, yes, she is a lady of spirit, proud and determined. She scrubs the floors herself and has nothing but black bread to eat, but won’t allow herself to be treated with disrespect. That’s why she would not overlook Mr. Lebeziatnikov’s rudeness to her, and so when he gave her a beating for it, she took to her bed more from the hurt to her feelings than from the blows. She was a widow when I married her, with three children, one smaller than the other. She married her first husband, an infantry officer, for love, and ran away with him from her father’s house. She was exceedingly fond of her husband; but he gave way to cards, got into trouble and with that he died. He used to beat her at the end: and although she paid him back, of which I have authentic documentary evidence, to this day she speaks of him with tears and she throws him up at me; and I am glad, I am glad that, though only in imagination, she should think of herself as having once been happy.… And she was left at his death with three children in a wild and remote district where I happened to be at the time; and she was left in such hopeless poverty that, although I have seen many ups and downs of all sorts, I don’t feel equal to describing it even. Her relations had all thrown her off. And she was proud, too, excessively proud.… And then, honoured sir, and then, I, being at the time a widower, with a daughter of fourteen left me by my first wife, offered her my hand, for I could not bear the sight of such suffering. You can judge the extremity of her calamities, that she, a woman of education and culture and distinguished family, should have consented to be my wife. But she did! Weeping and sobbing and wringing her hands, she married me! For she had nowhere to turn! Do you understand, sir, do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn? No, that you don’t understand yet…

But the period I studied -- the rollicking eighteenth century engraved by Hogarth -- was the one that saw the birth of America, of women's rights, and of the novel. The novel started as a low-class form, fit only to be read by serving maids, and it is the only literary form where women have distinguished themselves so early and with such excellence that even the rampant misogyny of literary history cannot erase them. Ever wonder about women and the novel? Women, like any underclass, depend for their survival on self-definition. The novel permitted this -- and pages could still be hidden under the embroidery hoop. From the writer's mind to the reader's there was only the intervention of printing presses. You could stay at home, yet send your book abroad to London -- the perfect situation for women. In a world where women are still the second sex, many still dream of becoming writers so they can work at home, make their own hours, nurse the baby. Writing still seems to fit into the interstices of a woman's life. Through the medium of words, we have hopes of changing our class. Perhaps the pen will not always be equated with the penis. In a world of computers, our swift fingers may yet win us the world. One of these days we'll have class. And so we write as feverishly as only the dispossessed can. We write to come into our own, to build our houses and plant our gardens, to give ourselves names and histories, inventing ourselves as we go along.

There is a certain strain of modern Western sociopolitical thinker that aggressively admires “meritocracy.” Every society should be a meritocracy, argue these adherents, and we should not pass laws that favor one group of people over another, for any reason. There should be no affirmative action laws for university admissions, no initiatives to gender-balance workforces. The cream shall simply rise to the top! These people (usually heterosexual, rich, white men, with a bookshelf full of Ayn Rand novels) conveniently forget that for a meritocracy to work—for a society to properly value and celebrate hard work and individual success —the people within the society need to start from the same point of origin. Otherwise, the cream isn’t rising to the top— the people who were closest to the top already are rising to the top, and the whole concept of meritocracy crumbles to dust. What they are actually calling for, these people, is a pseudo-meritocracy that does not distinguish between the accomplishments of a man with a Mayflower last name who inherited a billion dollars from his dad and those of a Black woman who was born into poverty in a redlined neighborhood in a state that enforces draconian, racist laws. (Some people, as the old saying goes, were born on third base and think they hit a triple.) It’s not a meritocracy if some runners start the race ten feet from the finish line and some are denied entry to the race because of systemic biases within the Racing Commission.

Of course, when we are young, at the age I was at the time of my walks along the Méséglise way, our desires and convictions confer on a woman’s clothing a unique character, an irreducible essence. We chase after the reality of a thing. But by the very fact of constantly letting it elude us, we end up noticing that, after all the vain attempts that have led to nothing, there is something solid there after all, which is what we have been pursuing. We begin to distinguish, to identify what it is we love, we try to procure it for ourselves, if only by artificial means. Then, in the absence of any convincing reality, costume comes to replace that reality by creating a deliberate illusion. I was perfectly aware that within half an hour’s distance from home I should not be in Brittany.

In every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual "taste"... [is] produce[d by the devil and his angels]. This they do bu working through the small circle of artists, dressmakers, actresses, and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. Thus [they] have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females-and there is more in that than you might suppose. As regards the male taste [they] have varied a good deal. At one time [they] have directed it to the statuesque and aristocratic type of beauty, mixing men's vanity with their desires and encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. At another, [they] have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type, faint and languishing, so that folly and cowardice, and all the general falseness and littleness of mind which go with them, shall be at a premium. At present [they] are on the opposite tack. The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and [they] now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, [they] thus aggravate the female's chronic horror of growing old (with many [successful] results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children. And that is not all. [They] have engineered a great increase in the license which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, or course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them to appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being "frank" and "healthy" and getting back to nature. As a result [they] are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist-making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible.

Gervex's painting had a lurid and well-known literary source: it was based on Alfred de Musset's poem "Rolla," published in 1833 and 1840. The poem, a paradigm of July Monarchy romanticism, chronicles the disgrace that befalls Jacques Rolla, a son of the bourgeoisie, in the big city. The narrative of his decline — he squandered his fortune and committed suicide — is interleaved with lamentations over the moral and spiritual decadence of contemporary life. Thenineteen-year-old Rolla becomes the "most debauched man" in Paris, "where vice is the cheapest, the oldest and the most fertile in the world." The poem tells a second story as well, that of Marie (or Maria or Marion), a pure young girl who becomes a degraded urban prostitute. Her story amplifies the poet's theme — a world in moral disarray - and provides the instrument of, and a sympathetic companion for, Rolla's climactic self-destruction. Musset is clear about his young prostitute's status: she was forced into a prostitution de la misère by economic circumstances ("what had debased her was, alas, poverty /And not love of gold"), and he frequently distinguishes her situation from that of the venal women of the courtesan rank ("Your loves are golden, lively and poetic; . . . you are not for sale at all"). He is also insistent about the tawdry circumstances in which the young woman had to practice her miserable profession ("the shameful curtains of that foul retreat," "in a hovel," "the walls of this gloomy and ramshackle room"). The segments of the poem from which Gervex drew his story — and which were published in press reviews of the painting — are these: With a melancholy eye Rolla gazed on The beautiful Marion asleep in her wide bed; In spite of himself, an unnameable and diabolical horror Made him tremble to the bone. Marion had cost dearly. — To pay for his night He had spent his last coins. His friends knew it. And he, on arriving, Had taken their hand and given his word that In the morning no one would see him alive. When Rolla saw the sun appear on the roofs, He went and leaned out the window. Rolla turned to look at Marie. She felt exhausted, and had fallen asleep. And thus both fled the cruelties of fate, The child in sleep, and the man in death! It was a moment of inaction, then, that Gervex chose to paint - that of weary repose for her and melancholic contemplation for Rolla, following the night of paid sex and just prior to his suicide.

aid an afflicted man to me, when I was last in a hospital like this, ‘Sir, I can frequently fly.’ I was half ashamed to reflect that so could I – by night. Said a woman to me on the same occasion, 'Queen Victoria frequently comes to dine with me, and her Majesty and I dine off peaches and maccaroni in our nightgowns, and His Royal Highness the Prince Consort does us the honour to make a third on horseback in a Field Marshal’s uniform.’ Could I refrain from reddening with consciousness when I remembered the amazing royal parties I myself have given (at night), the unaccountable viands I have put on table, and my extraordinary manner of conduction myself on those distinguished occasions? I wonder that the great master who knew everything when he called Sleep the death of each day’s life, did not call Dreams, the insanity of each day’s sanity

Said an afflicted man to me, when I was last in a hospital like this, ‘Sir, I can frequently fly.’ I was half ashamed to reflect that so could I – by night. Said a woman to me on the same occasion, 'Queen Victoria frequently comes to dine with me, and her Majesty and I dine off peaches and maccaroni in our nightgowns, and His Royal Highness the Prince Consort does us the honour to make a third on horseback in a Field Marshal’s uniform.’ Could I refrain from reddening with consciousness when I remembered the amazing royal parties I myself have given (at night), the unaccountable viands I have put on table, and my extraordinary manner of conduction myself on those distinguished occasions? I wonder that the great master who knew everything when he called Sleep the death of each day’s life, did not call Dreams, the insanity of each day’s sanity

She had only time, however, to move closer to the table where he had been writing, when footsteps were heard returning; the door opened; it was himself. He begged their pardon, but he had forgotten his gloves, and instantly crossing the room to the writing table, and standing with his back towards Mrs. Musgrove, he drew out a letter from under the scattered paper, placed it before Anne with eyes of glowing entreaty fixed on her for a moment, and hastily collecting his gloves, was again out of the room, almost before Mrs. Musgrove was aware of his being in it - the work of an instant! The revolution which one instant had made in Anne, was almost beyond expression. The letter, with a direction hardily legible, to 'Miss A.E. - ,' was evidently the one which he had been folding so hastily. While supposed to be writing only to Captain Benwick, he had been also addressing her! On the contents of that letter depended all which this world could do for her! Any thing was possible, any thing might be defied rather than suspense. Mrs. Musgrove had little arrangements of her own at her own table; to their protection she must trust, and sinking into the chair which he had occupied, succeeding to the very spot where he had leaned and written, her eyes devoured the following words: 'I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. - Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.' 'I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.

In the struggle between Muhammad's dream of a society in which women could move freely around the city (because the social control would be the Muslim faith that disciplines desire), and the customs of the Hypocrites who only thought of a woman as an object of envy and violence, it was this latter vision that would carry the day. The veil represents the triumph of the Hypocrites. Slaves would continue to be harassed and attacked in the streets. The female Muslim population would henceforth be divided by a hijab into two categories: free women, against whom violence is forbidden, and women slaves, toward whom ta'arrud [taking up a position along a woman's path to urge her to fornicate] is permitted. In the logic of the hijab, the law of tribal violence replaces the intellect of the believer, which the Muslim God affirms is indispensable for distinguishing good from evil.

In Elizabethan times lovers were so enamored of each other’s body odors that it was common for a woman to keep a peeled apple in her armpit until it had absorbed her sweat and smell. She would give this “love apple” to her lover to sniff at in her absence. We, on the other hand, use synthetic aromas of fruits and flowers to mask our body odor from our lovers. Which of these two approaches is acquired and which is natural is not so easy to determine. A substance as “naturally” repugnant to us as the urine of cows is used by the Masai tribe in East Africa as a lotion for their hair—a direct consequence of the cow’s importance in their culture. Many tastes we think “natural” are acquired through learning and become “second nature” to us. We are unable to distinguish our “second nature” from our “original nature” because our neuroplastic brains, once rewired, develop a new nature, every bit as biological as our original.

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too

There's a widespread misconception that biblical literalism is facile and mindless, but the doctrine I was introduced to at Moody was every bit as complicated and arcane as Marxist theory or post-structuralism.... In many ways, Christian literalism is even more complicated than liberal brands of theology because it involves the sticky task of reconciling the overlay myth—the story of redemption—with a wildly inconsistent body of scripture. This requires consummate parsing of Old Testament commands, distinguishing between the universal (e.g., thou shalt not kill) from those particular to the Mosaic law that are no longer relevant after the death of Christ (e.g., a sexually violated woman must marry her rapist). It requires making the elaborate case that the Song of Solomon, a book of Hebrew erotica that managed to wangle its way into the canon, is a metaphor about Christ's love for the church, and that the starkly nihilistic book of Ecclesiastes is a representation of the hopelessness of life without God.

I once knew a weak woman of fashion, who was more than commonly proud of her delicacy and sensibility. She thought a distinguishing taste and puny appetite the height of all human perfection, and acted accordingly. I have seen this weak sophisticated being neglect all the duties of life, yet recline with self-complacency on a sofa, and boast of her want of appetite as a proof of delicacy that extended to, or, perhaps, arose from, her exquisite sensibility: for it is difficult to render intelligible such ridiculous jargon. Yet, at the moment, I have seen her insult a worthy old gentlewoman, whom unexpected misfortunes had made dependent on her ostentatious bounty, and who, in better days, had claims on her gratitude. Is it possible that a human creature should have become such a weak and depraved being, if, like the Sybarites, dissolved in luxury, every thing like virtue had not been worn away, or never impressed by precept, a poor substitute it is true, for cultivation of mind, though it serves as a fence against vice?

AGNES EGGLING: mid- to late 30s; preferably heavyset. Bit player / character actress in the German film industry. GREGOR BAZWALD (BAZ): early to mid-30s. Homosexual who works for the Berlin Institute for Human Sexuality. PAULINKA ERDNUSS: mid-30s, but looks a little younger. Actress in the German film industry; a featured player on her way to becoming a minor star. ANNABELLA GOTCHLING: mid-40s. Communist artist and graphic designer. VEALTNINC HUSZ: mid-40s. Cinematographer. Hungarian exile. Missing an eye, he wears spectacles with one lens blackened. ROSA MALEK: mid- to late 20s. Minor functionary of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands). EMIL TRAUM: mid- to late 20s. Slightly higher-ranking functionary of the KPD. DIE ALTE: a woman, very old but hard to tell how old—somewhere between 70 and dead-for-20-years. White face and rotten teeth. Dressed in a nightgown, once white but now soiled and food-stained. GOTTFRIED SWETTS: ageless; when he looks good he could be 30, when he looks bad he could be 50 (or more). Distinguished, handsome, blond, Aryan. ZILLAH KATZ: contemporary American Jewish woman. 30s. BoHo/East Village New Wave with Anarcho-Punk tendencies.

I lift the lid of the chest. Inside, the air is musty and stale, held hostage for years in its three-foot-by-four-foot tomb. I lean in to survey the contents cautiously, then pull out a stack of old photos tied with twine. On top is a photo of a couple on their wedding day. She's a young bride, wearing one of those 1950's netted veils. He looks older, distinguished- sort of like Cary Grant or Gregory Peck in the old black-and-white movies I used to watch with my grandmother. I set the stack down and turn back to the chest, where I find a notebook, filled with handwritten recipes. The page for Cinnamon Rolls is labeled "Dex's Favorite." 'Dex.' I wonder if he's the man in the photo. There are two ticket stubs from 1959, one to a Frank Sinatra concert, another to the movie 'An Affair to Remember.' A single shriveled rosebud rests on a white handkerchief. A corsage? When I lift it into my hand, it disintegrates; the petals crinkle into tiny pieces that fall onto the living room carpet. At the bottom of the chest is what looks like a wedding dress. It's yellowed and moth-eaten, but I imagine it was once stark white and beautiful. As I lift it, I can hear the lace swishing as if to say, "Ahh." Whoever wore it was very petite. The waist circumference is tiny. A pair of long white gloves falls to the floor. They must have been tucked inside the dress. I refold the finery and set the ensemble back inside. Whose things are these? And why have they been left here? I thumb through the recipe book. All cookies, cakes, desserts. She must have loved to bake. I tuck the book back inside the chest, along with the photographs after I've retied the twine, which is when I notice a book tucked into the corner. It's an old paperback copy of Ernest Hemingway's 'The Sun Also Rises.' I've read a little of Hemingway over the years- 'A Moveable Feast' and some of his later work- but not this one. I flip through the book and notice that one page is dog-eared. I open to it and see a line that has been underscored. "You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another." I look out to the lake, letting the words sink in. 'Is that what I'm trying to do? Get away from myself?' I stare at the line in the book again and wonder if it resonated with the woman who underlined it so many years ago. Did she have her own secret pain? 'Was she trying to escape it just like me?

All Night, All Night Rode in the train all night, in the sick light. A bird Flew parallel with a singular will. In daydream's moods and attitudes The other passengers slumped, dozed, slept, read, Waiting, and waiting for place to be displaced On the exact track of safety or the rack of accident. Looked out at the night, unable to distinguish Lights in the towns of passage from the yellow lights Numb on the ceiling. And the bird flew parallel and still As the train shot forth the straight line of its whistle, Forward on the taut tracks, piercing empty, familiar -- The bored center of this vision and condition looked and looked Down through the slick pages of the magazine (seeking The seen and the unseen) and his gaze fell down the well Of the great darkness under the slick glitter, And he was only one among eight million riders and readers. And all the while under his empty smile the shaking drum Of the long determined passage passed through him By his body mimicked and echoed. And then the train Like a suddenly storming rain, began to rush and thresh-- The silent or passive night, pressing and impressing The patients' foreheads with a tightening-like image Of the rushing engine proceeded by a shaft of light Piercing the dark, changing and transforming the silence Into a violence of foam, sound, smoke and succession. A bored child went to get a cup of water, And crushed the cup because the water too was Boring and merely boredom's struggle. The child, returning, looked over the shoulder Of a man reading until he annoyed the shoulder. A fat woman yawned and felt the liquid drops Drip down the fleece of many dinners. And the bird flew parallel and parallel flew The black pencil lines of telephone posts, crucified, At regular intervals, post after post Of thrice crossed, blue-belled, anonymous trees. And then the bird cried as if to all of us: 0 your life, your lonely life What have you ever done with it, And done with the great gift of consciousness? What will you ever do with your life before death's knife Provides the answer ultimate and appropriate? As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls, Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feel the vast Draft of the abyss sucking him down and down, An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown: This is the way that night passes by, this Is the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.

Let us begin by distinguishing between what is moral and what is physical in the passion called love. The physical part of it is that general desire which prompts the sexes to unite with each other; the moral part is that which determines that desire, and fixes it upon a particular object to the exclusion of all others, or at least gives it a greater degree of energy for this preferred object. Now it is easy to perceive that the moral part of love is a factitious sentiment, engendered by society, and cried up by the women with great care and address in order to establish their empire, and secure command to that sex which ought to obey. This sentiment, being founded on certain notions of beauty and merit which a savage is not capable of having, and upon comparisons which he is not capable of making, can scarcely exist in him: for as his mind was never in a condition to form abstract ideas of regularity and proportion, neither is his heart susceptible of sentiments of admiration and love, which, even without our perceiving it, are produced by our application of these ideas; he listens solely to the dispositions implanted in him by nature, and not to taste which he never was in a way of acquiring; and every woman answers his purpose.

Do you think I’m so silly that I can’t understand your sometimes getting fed up with playing the Good Samaritan here day after day, can’t realize that a grown man would rather go for a ride or take his sound legs for a walk than sit about by an invalid’s chair? There’s only one thing that disgusts me, one thing I can’t stand, and that is excuses, humbug, lies — I’m fed to the teeth with them. I’m not so stupid as you all think, and I can stand quite a lot of frankness. A few days ago we engaged a new charwoman in place of the old one who had died, and the very first day she was here, before she had talked to anyone — she saw me being helped across to an arm-chair on my crutches. She dropped her scrubbing brush in horror and screamed out: “Lord Jesus, such a rich, distinguished young lady … being a cripple!” Ilona went for the poor, honest creature like a wild thing; she was going to dismiss her and throw her out on the spot. But I, I liked it, the woman’s horror did me good, because, after all, it is honest, it is human, to be horrified at seeing such a sight all of a sudden. I promptly gave her ten crowns and she went off to the church to pray for me. The whole day I felt glad, yes, positively glad, at knowing at last what others really feel when they see me for the first time

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W. “I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father’s house this evening or never.

He talks about the way in which the American academy "assigns an official group identity" to students, eliminating the distinction "between voluntary association and imposed group identity." For example, "a Jewish student who is totally assimilated—whose Jewish identity is totally unimportant to him—goes to college and is assigned a special Jewish advisor." The academy also distinguishes between people who "own" their sexual, racial, or gender identity and those who, in its view, have "internalized their oppression.' For example, Kors says, Walter Olson, a tort reform expert at the Cato Institute who happens to be gay, "is not really gay because he doesn't understand the sources of his oppression." Thomas Sowell, an African American author based at the Hoover Institution, "isn't really black." And "Daphne Patai, a founder of Women's Studies at Amherst, isn't really a woman because she identifies with the oppressive culture around her. So in the humanities, when they speak of diversity, the one kind of diversity they don't mean is individuated intellectual diversity." On the contrary, there's a process of "vetting against individuation. The people who are most discriminated against, then, are not straight white males who just roll over and play along, but rather libertarian and conservative blacks, women who are critics of feminism, and gays and lesbians who are critics of the 'official' gay and lesbian positions on every issue in the world.

Buxton says that when one partner in a marriage comes out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, about a third of the couples break up right away, a third break up after about two years, and a third stay married indefinitely.3 We don’t know a whole lot about that last third—the more than 30 percent of mixed-orientation marriages that remain intact. From the research I’ve read, many of them are negotiating open relationships, but few consider themselves polyamorous or identify with or seek out a nonmonogamous community. As a result, they are left out of significant discussions about nonmonogamy. Research and writing on this topic (including Buxton’s) makes a point of distinguishing between partners who come out as gay or lesbian and partners who come out as bisexual. Those are individual identity choices; I am less concerned with how a person identifies and more interested in the relationship between the straight spouse and the nonstraight spouse, because that ultimately determines what style of open relationship will work for them. Some couples remain primary partners and continue to have a sexual relationship, while others end the sexual element of their partnership. In one of Buxton’s studies, the straight husband of a bisexual woman wrote: “I compare my wife and me to a glove with fingers that fit absolutely perfect. It’s the thumb that is just wrong. The more we struggle to make the thumb fit, the worse off we make the fingers. If we free ourselves to adjust the gloves for our thumbs, then the fingers return to their old wonderful fit.”4

We end up at an outdoor paintball course in Jersey. A woodsy, rural kind of place that’s probably brimming with mosquitos and Lyme disease. When I find out Logan has never played paintball before, I sign us both up. There’s really no other option. And our timing is perfect—they’re just about to start a new battle. The worker gathers all the players in a field and divides us into two teams, handing out thin blue and yellow vests to distinguish friend from foe. Since Logan and I are the oldest players, we both become the team captains. The wide-eyed little faces of Logan’s squad follow him as he marches back and forth in front of them, lecturing like a hot, modern-day Winston Churchill. “We’ll fight them from the hills, we’ll fight them in the trees. We’ll hunker down in the river and take them out, sniper-style. Save your ammo—fire only when you see the whites of their eyes. Use your heads.” I turn to my own ragtag crew. “Use your hearts. We’ll give them everything we’ve got—leave it all on the field. You know what wins battles? Desire! Guts! Today, we’ll all be frigging Rudy!” A blond boy whispers to his friend, “Who’s Rudy?” The kid shrugs. And another raises his hand. “Can we start now? It’s my birthday and I really want to have cake.” “It’s my birthday too.” I give him a high-five. “Twinning!” I raise my gun. “And yes, birthday cake will be our spoils of war! Here’s how it’s gonna go.” I point to the giant on the other side of the field. “You see him, the big guy? We converge on him first. Work together to take him down. Cut off the head,” I slice my finger across my neck like I’m beheading myself, “and the old dog dies.” A skinny kid in glasses makes a grossed-out face. “Why would you kill a dog? Why would you cut its head off?” And a little girl in braids squeaks, “Mommy! Mommy, I don’t want to play anymore.” “No,” I try, “that’s not what I—” But she’s already running into her mom’s arms. The woman picks her up—glaring at me like I’m a demon—and carries her away. “Darn.” Then a soft voice whispers right against my ear. “They’re already going AWOL on you, lass? You’re fucked.” I turn to face the bold, tough Wessconian . . . and he’s so close, I can feel the heat from his hard body, see the small sprigs of stubble on that perfect, gorgeous jaw. My brain stutters, but I find the resolve to tease him. “Dear God, Logan, are you smiling? Careful—you might pull a muscle in your face.” And then Logan does something that melts my insides and turns my knees to quivery goo. He laughs. And it’s beautiful. It’s a crime he doesn’t do it more often. Or maybe a blessing. Because Logan St. James is a sexy, stunning man on any given day. But when he laughs? He’s heart-stopping. He swaggers confidently back to his side and I sneer at his retreating form. The uniformed paintball worker blows a whistle and explains the rules. We get seven minutes to hide first. I cock my paintball shotgun with one hand—like Charlize Theron in Fury fucking Road—and lead my team into the wilderness. “Come on, children. Let’s go be heroes.” It was a massacre. We never stood a chance. In the end, we tried to rush them—overpower them—but we just ended up running into a hail of balls, getting our hearts and guts splattered with blue paint. But we tried—I think Rudy and Charlize would be proud

To start with, at that time I'd gone to bed with probably three dozen boys, all of them either German or English; never with a woman. Nonetheless -- and incredible thought it may seem -- I still assumed that a day would come when I would fall in love with some lovely, intelligent girl, whom I would marry and who would bear me children. And what of my attraction to men? To tell the truth, I didn't worry much about it. I pretended my homosexuality was a function of my youth, that when I "grew up" it would fall away, like baby teeth, to be replaced by something more mature and permanent. I, after all, was no pansy; the boy in Croydon who hanged himself after his father caught him in makeup and garters, he was a pansy, as was Oscar Wilde, my first-form Latin tutor, Channing's friend Peter Lovesey's brother. Pansies farted differently, and went to pubs where the barstools didn't have seats, and had very little in common with my crowd, by which I meant Higel and Horst and our other homosexual friends, all of whom were aggressively, unreservedly masculine, reveled in all things male, and held no truck with sissies and fairies, the overrefined Rupert Halliwells of the world. To the untrained eye nothing distinguished us from "normal" men. Though I must confess that by 1936 the majority of my friends had stopped deluding themselves into believing their homosexuality was merely a phase. They claimed, rather, to have sworn off women, by choice. For them, homosexuality was an act of rebellion, a way of flouting the rigid mores of Edwardian England, but they were also fundamentally misogynists who would have much preferred living in a world devoid of things feminine, where men bred parthenogenically. Women, according to these friends, were the “class enemy” in a sexual revolution. Infuriated by our indifference to them (and to the natural order), they schemed to trap and convert us*, thus foiling the challenge we presented to the invincible heterosexual bond. Such thinking excited me - anything smacking of rebellion did - but it also frightened me. It seemed to me then that my friends’ misogyny blinded them to the fact that heterosexual men, not women, had been up until now, and would probably always be, their most relentless enemies. My friends didn’t like women, however, and therefore couldn’t acknowledge that women might be truer comrades to us than the John Northrops whose approval we so desperately craved. So I refused to make the same choice they did, although, crucially, I still believed it was a choice.

I have come, my lovely,” Roddy said with his usual sardonic grin as he swept her a deep bow, “in answer to your urgent summons-and, I might add,-“ he continued, “before I presented myself at the Willingtons’, exactly as your message instructed.” At 5’10”, Roddy Carstairs was a slender man of athletic build with thinning brown hair and light blue eyes. In fact, his only distinguishing characteristics were his fastidiously tailored clothes, a much-envied ability to tie a neckcloth into magnificently intricate folds that never drooped, and an acid wit that accepted no boundaries when he chose a human target. “Did you hear about Kensington?” “Who?” Alex said absently, trying to think of the best means to persuade him to do what she needed done. “The new Marquess of Kensington, once known as Mr. Ian Thornton, persona non grata. Amazing, is it not, what wealth and title will do?” he continued, studying Alex’s tense face as he continued, “Two years ago we wouldn’t have let him past the front door. Six months ago word got out that he’s worth a fortune, and we started inviting him to our parties. Tonight he’s the heir to a dukedom, and we’ll be coveting invitations to his parties. We are”-Roddy grinned-“when you consider matters from this point of view, a rather sickening and fickle lot.” In spite of herself, Alexandra laughed. “Oh, Roddy,” she said, pressing a kiss on his cheek. “You always make me laugh, even when I’m in the most dreadful coil, which I am now. You could make things so very much better-if you would.” Roddy helped himself to a pinch of snuff, lifted his arrogant brows, and waited, his look both suspicious and intrigued. “I am, of course, your most obedient servant,” he drawled with a little mocking bow. Despite that claim, Alexandra knew better. While other men might be feared for their tempers or their skill with rapier and pistol, Roddy Carstairs was feared for his cutting barbs and razor tongue. And, while one could not carry a rapier or a pistol into a ball, Roddy could do his damage there unimpeded. Even sophisticated matrons lived in fear of being on the wrong side of him. Alex knew exactly how deadly he could be-and how helpful, for he had made her life a living hell when she came to London the first time. Later he had done a complete turnabout, and it had been Roddy who had forced the ton to accept her. He had done it not out of friendship or guilt; he had done it because he’d decided it would be amusing to test his power by building a reputation for a change, instead of shredding it. “There is a young woman whose name I’ll reveal in a moment,” Alex began cautiously, “to whom you could be of great service. You could, in fact, rescue her as you did me long ago, Roddy, if only you would.” “Once was enough,” he mocked. “I could hardly hold my head up for shame when I thought of my unprecedented gallantry.” “She’s incredibly beautiful,” Alex said. A mild spark of interest showed in Roddy’s eyes, but nothing stronger. While other men might be affected by feminine beauty, Roddy generally took pleasure in pointing out one’s faults for the glee of it. He enjoyed flustering women and never hesitated to do it. But when he decided to be kind he was the most loyal of friends.

He was but three-and-twenty, and had only just learned what it is to love—­to love with that adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself. Love of this sort is hardly distinguishable from religious feeling. What deep and worthy love is so, whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery. And this blessed gift of venerating love has been given to too many humble craftsmen since the world began for us to feel any surprise that it should have existed in the soul of a Methodist carpenter half a century ago, while there was yet a lingering after-glow from the time when Wesley and his fellow-labourer fed on the hips and haws of the Cornwall hedges, after exhausting limbs and lungs in carrying a divine message to the poor. That afterglow has long faded away; and the picture we are apt to make of Methodism in our imagination is not an amphitheatre of green hills, or the deep shade of broad-leaved sycamores, where a crowd of rough men and weary-hearted women drank in a faith which was a rudimentary culture, which linked their thoughts with the past, lifted their imagination above the sordid details of their own narrow lives, and suffused their souls with the sense of a pitying, loving, infinite Presence, sweet as summer to the houseless needy. It is too possible that to some of my readers Methodism may mean nothing more than low-pitched gables up dingy streets, sleek grocers, sponging preachers, and hypocritical jargon—­elements which are regarded as an exhaustive analysis of Methodism in many fashionable quarters. That would be a pity; for I cannot pretend that Seth and Dinah were anything else than Methodists—­not indeed of that modern type which reads quarterly reviews and attends in chapels with pillared porticoes, but of a very old-fashioned kind. They believed in present miracles, in instantaneous conversions, in revelations by dreams and visions; they drew lots, and sought for Divine guidance by opening the Bible at hazard; having a literal way of interpreting the Scriptures, which is not at all sanctioned by approved commentators; and it is impossible for me to represent their diction as correct, or their instruction as liberal. Still—­if I have read religious history aright—­faith, hope, and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords, and it is possible—­thank Heaven!—­to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings. The raw bacon which clumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store that she may carry it to her neighbour’s child to “stop the fits,” may be a piteously inefficacious remedy; but the generous stirring of neighbourly kindness that prompted the deed has a beneficent radiation that is not lost. Considering these things, we can hardly think Dinah and Seth beneath our sympathy, accustomed as we may be to weep over the loftier sorrows of heroines in satin boots and crinoline, and of heroes riding fiery horses, themselves ridden by still more fiery passions.

Another dangerous neoliberal word circulating everywhere that is worth zooming in on is the word ‘resilience’. On the surface, I think many people won’t object to the idea that it is good and beneficial for us to be resilient to withstand the difficulties and challenges of life. As a person who lived through the atrocities of wars and sanctions in Iraq, I’ve learnt that life is not about being happy or sad, not about laughing or crying, leaving or staying. Life is about endurance. Since most feelings, moods, and states of being are fleeting, endurance, for me, is the common denominator that helps me go through the darkest and most beautiful moments of life knowing that they are fleeing. In that sense, I believe it is good for us to master the art of resilience and endurance. Yet, how should we think about the meaning of ‘resilience’ when used by ruling classes that push for wars and occupations, and that contribute to producing millions of deaths and refugees to profit from plundering the planet? What does it mean when these same warmongers fund humanitarian organizations asking them to go to war-torn countries to teach people the value of ‘resilience’? What happens to the meaning of ‘resilience’ when they create frighteningly precarious economic structures, uncertain employment, and lay off people without accountability? All this while also asking us to be ‘resilient’… As such, we must not let the word ‘resilience’ circulate or get planted in the heads of our youth uncritically. Instead, we should raise questions about what it really means. Does it mean the same thing for a poor young man or woman from Ghana, Ecuador, Afghanistan vs a privileged member from the upper management of a U.S. corporation? Resilience towards what? What is the root of the challenges for which we are expected to be resilient? Does our resilience solve the cause or the root of the problem or does it maintain the status quo while we wait for the next disaster? Are individuals always to blame if their resilience doesn’t yield any results, or should we equally examine the social contract and the entire structure in which individuals live that might be designed in such a way that one’s resilience may not prevail no matter how much perseverance and sacrifice one demonstrates? There is no doubt that resilience, according to its neoliberal corporate meaning, is used in a way that places the sole responsibility of failure on the shoulders of individuals rather than equally holding accountable the structure in which these individuals exist, and the precarious circumstances that require work and commitment way beyond individual capabilities and resources. I find it more effective not to simply aspire to be resilient, but to distinguish between situations in which individual resilience can do, and those for which the depth, awareness, and work of an entire community or society is needed for any real and sustainable change to occur. But none of this can happen if we don’t first agree upon what each of us mean when we say ‘resilience,’ and if we have different definitions of what it means, then we should ask: how shall we merge and reconcile our definitions of the word so that we complement not undermine what we do individually and collectively as people. Resilience should not become a synonym for surrender. It is great to be resilient when facing a flood or an earthquake, but that is not the same when having to endure wars and economic crises caused by the ruling class and warmongers. [From “On the Great Resignation” published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]

Under these circumstances the most anodyne book was a source of danger from the simple fact that love was alluded to, and woman depicted as an attractive creature; and this was enough to account for all—for the inherent ignorance of Catholics, since it was proclaimed as the preventive cure for temptations—for the instinctive horror of art, since to these craven souls every written and studied work was in its nature a vehicle of sin and an incitement to fall. Would it not really be far more sensible and judicious to open the windows, to air the rooms, to treat these souls as manly beings, to teach them not to be so much afraid of their own flesh, to inculcate the firmness and courage needed for resistance? For really it is rather like a dog which barks at your heels and snaps at your legs if you are afraid of him, but who beats a retreat if you turn on him boldly and drive him off. The fact remains that these schemes of education have resulted, on the one hand, in the triumph of the flesh in the greater number of men who have been thus brought up and then thrown into a worldly life, and on the other, in a wide diffusion of folly and fear, an abandonment of the possessions of the intellect and the capitulation of the Catholic army surrendering without a blow to the inroads of profane literature, which takes possession of territory that it has not even had the trouble of conquering. This really was madness! The Church had created art, had cherished it for centuries; and now by the effeteness of her sons she was cast into a corner. All the great movements of our day, one after the other—romanticism, naturalism—had been effected independently of her, or even against her will. If a book were not restricted to the simplest tales, or pleasing fiction ending in virtue rewarded and vice punished, that was enough; the propriety of beadledom was at once ready to bray. As soon as the most modern form of art, the most malleable and the broadest—the Novel—touched on scenes of real life, depicted passion, became a psychological study, an effort of analysis, the army of bigots fell back all along the line. The Catholic force, which might have been thought better prepared than any others to contest the ground which theology had long since explored, retired in good order, satisfied to cover its retreat by firing from a safe distance, with its old-fashioned match-lock blunderbusses, on works it had neither inspired nor written. The Church party, centuries behind the time, and having made no attempt to follow the evolution of style in the course of ages, now turned to the rustic who can scarcely read; it did not understand more than half of the words used by modern writers, and had become, it must be said, a camp of the illiterate. Incapable of distinguishing the good from the bad, it included in one condemnation the filth of pornography and real works of art; in short, it ended by emitting such folly and talking such preposterous nonsense, that it fell into utter discredit and ceased to count at all. And it would have been so easy for it to work on a little way, to try to keep up with the times, and to understand, to convince itself whether in any given work the author was writing up the Flesh, glorifying it, praising it, and nothing more, or whether, on the contrary, he depicted it merely to buffet it—hating it. And, again, it would have done well to convince itself that there is a chaste as well as a prurient nude, and that it should not cry shame on every picture in which the nude is shown. Above all, it ought to have recognized that vices may well be depicted and studied with a view to exciting disgust of them and showing their horrors.

My own observations had by now convinced me that the mind of the average Westerner held an utterly distorted image of Islam. What I saw in the pages of the Koran was not a ‘crudely materialistic’ world-view but, on the contrary, an intense God-consciousness that expressed itself in a rational acceptance of all God-created nature: a harmonious side-by-side of intellect and sensual urge, spiritual need and social demand. It was obvious to me that the decline of the Muslims was not due to any shortcomings in Islam but rather to their own failure to live up to it. For, indeed, it was Islam that had carried the early Muslims to tremendous cultural heights by directing all their energies toward conscious thought as the only means to understanding the nature of God’s creation and, thus, of His will. No demand had been made of them to believe in dogmas difficult or even impossible of intellectual comprehension; in fact, no dogma whatsoever was to be found in the Prophet’s message: and, thus, the thirst after knowledge which distinguished early Muslim history had not been forced, as elsewhere in the world, to assert itself in a painful struggle against the traditional faith. On the contrary, it had stemmed exclusively from that faith. The Arabian Prophet had declared that ‘Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim man and woman’: and his followers were led to understand that only by acquiring knowledge could they fully worship the Lord. When they pondered the Prophet’s saying, ‘God creates no disease without creating a cure for it as well’, they realised that by searching for unknown cures they would contribute to a fulfilment of God’s will on earth: and so medical research became invested with the holiness of a religious duty. They read the Koran verse, ‘We create every living thing out of water’ - and in their endeavour to penetrate to the meaning of these words, they began to study living organisms and the laws of their development: and thus they established the science of biology. The Koran pointed to the harmony of the stars and their movements as witnesses of their Creator’s glory: and thereupon the sciences of astronomy and mathematics were taken up by the Muslims with a fervour which in other religions was reserved for prayer alone. The Copernican system, which established the earth’s rotation around its axis and the revolution of the planet’s around the sun, was evolved in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century (only to be met by the fury of the ecclesiastics, who read in it a contradiction of the literal teachings of the Bible): but the foundations of this system had actually been laid six hundred years earlier, in Muslim countries - for already in the ninth and tenth centuries Muslim astronomers had reached the conclusion that the earth was globular and that it rotated around its axis, and had made accurate calculations of latitudes and longitudes; and many of them maintained - without ever being accused of hearsay - that the earth rotated around the sun. And in the same way they took to chemistry and physics and physiology, and to all the other sciences in which the Muslim genius was to find its most lasting monument. In building that monument they did no more than follow the admonition of their Prophet that ‘If anybody proceeds on his way in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him the way to Paradise’; that ‘The scientist walks in the path of God’; that ‘The superiority of the learned man over the mere pious is like the superiority of the moon when it is full over all other stars’; and that ‘The ink of the scholars is more precious that the blood of martyrs’. Throughout the whole creative period of Muslim history - that is to say, during the first five centuries after the Prophet’s time - science and learning had no greater champion than Muslim civilisation and no home more secure than the lands in which Islam was supreme.

She’s watching me in the dawn’s first light with an intensity that melts me. Her face a vivid world, I no longer know if I exist inside a photograph or if I once existed in the whiteness of the morning in front of this slow-gesturing woman who, never taking her eyes off me, is lying there in front of me, naked more naked than the night, more physical than a whole life spent caressing the beauty of the world. Sustaining her gaze is painful. I imagine, I breathe and imagine her once more. A few centimetres below the manubrium glints a little diamond that seems to stay on her chest by magic. The diamond, no doubt held there by a little ring inserted into the flesh, sparkles like a provocation, an object of light that lies in wait for desire, engulfs the other. I am that other. I am pure emotion lying in wait for the fate crouched inside this woman. The woman offers her desire, sows sentences in me whose syntax is unfamiliar and which I’m unable to follow and pronounce. Words there I cannot clearly distinguish – breasts, gusts, ships, stext – and, in between them, the woman’s lips move like some life-giving water that cleanses away all clichés, promises that every imprint of the gaze will be sexual, will be repeated and fluid as vivid as the morning light absorbing one’s most intimate thoughts. Her arms are open. She opens herself to the embraces that, in mother tongue, suspend reality. The woman has turned her head slightly and her throat astonishes. Her gaze contains traces of that water which, it is said, gushes when memory becomes verb and rekindles desire at the edge of the labia. The woman’s gaze sweeps into the future. Simone sometimes finds herself comparing herself to the woman of action, of business and of spirit, wise to intrigue, that was Marie de l’Incarnation.

The issue here is not whether self-veiling can be avoided, or even should be avoided. Indeed, no finite play is possible without it. The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask. Consider the actress whose skill at making Ophelia appear as this woman demonstrates the clarity with which she can distinguish the role from herself. Is it not possible that when whe leaves the stage she does not give up acting, but simply leaves off one role for another, say the role of "actress," an abstracted personage whose public behavior is carefully scripted and produced. At which point do we confront the fact that we live one life and perform another, or others, attempting to make our momentary forgetting true and lasting forgetting?

Jewel Hyun, a Korean American woman, became engaged in global ministry later in life. She enjoyed meeting with me as she prepared for ministry trips, during which she would speak in other countries at conferences. On one occasion she was preparing for a trip to East Africa, where she would be speaking to women who had suffered displacement as refugees as the result of an ethnic genocide. She was concerned about how she could "connect" with these women who lived in such a different world. If you just met jewel, who looks very distinguished, you would never know that her childhood years included fleeing from North Korea and living with her family as refugees. I knew her story, so I responded, "Tell them your own story." "Why would they want to hear my story?" she replied. "Because when these women look at you, they will think to themselves, `This is a nice lady with beautiful clothes and manicured fingernails. She's nice, but she has no idea of the life we've lived.' When you tell them your story, you will be a living representative of hope for them." Jewel told me later that her story connected her deeply to the women, as they realized that she too had shared in the fellowship of suffering.

Where there are two on point of independently distinguished purposes, you will find one infinite journey whose path is blazed with the guiding light of wisdom.

She is distinguished from a courtisane only in that she does not offer her body for money by the hour like a commodity, but sells it into slavery for once and all. Fourier's words hold good with respect to all conventional marriages: "As in grammar two negatives make one affirmative, so in matrimonial ethics, two prostitutions are considered as one virtue." Sexual love in man's relation to woman becomes and can become the rule among the oppressed classes alone, among the proletarians of our day—no matter whether this relation is officially sanctioned or not. Here