Erica Jong Fear Of Flying Quotes

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.

Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture . . . Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don't want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don't want to fuck while pretending he's the one you do. That's called fidelity. That's called monogamy. That's called civilization and its discontents.

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it...

The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy's encampment: the prick at half-mast. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self-destructs. That was the basic inequity which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy.

Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.

There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.

I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like "fidelity" and "adultery", by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that I had him I'd be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game . The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.

Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture…Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.

Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist.

All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.

Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old.

You don't have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty.

It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper. And now that I can take it . . . now that I can finally do it . . . I'm really raring to go. I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed. "Freedom is an illusion," Bennett would have said and, in a way, I too would have agreed. Sanity, moderation, hard work, stability . . . I believed in them too. But what was that other voice inside of me which kept urging me on toward zipless fucks, and speeding cars and endless wet kisses and guts full of danger? What was that other voice which kept calling me coward! and egging me on to burn my bridges, to swallow the poison in one gulp instead of drop by drop, to go down into the bottom of my fear and see if I could pull myself up? Was it a voice? Or was it a thump? Something even more primitive than speech. A kind of pounding in my gut which I had nicknamed my "hunger-thump." It was as if my stomach thought of itself as a heart. And no matter how I filled it—with men, with books, with food—it refused to be still. Unfillable—that's what I was. Nymphomania of the brain. Starvation of the heart.

I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps.We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves !

Tears are a form of communication - like speech - and require a listener.

And it all comes out so lame. I love your mouth. I love your hair. I love your ears. I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

We're programmed for suffering, not joy. The masochism is built in at a very early age. You're supposed to work and suffer - and the trouble is: you believe it.

There's nothing good about being ordinary. People don't respect you for it. People run after people who are different, who have confidence in their own taste, who don't run with the herd. There is nothing gained by giving in to the pressures of group vulgarity.

I had gone to graduate school because I loved literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism. Some professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a Marxist parable. Some other professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a Christian parable. Some other professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a parable of the Industrial Revolution. . . . Nobody seemed to give a shit about your reading TOM JONES as long as you could reel off the names of the various theories and who invented them. . . . My response was to sleep through as much of it as possible.

What all the ads and whorescopes seemed to imply was that if only you took proper care of your smells, your hair, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, your choice of Scotch in bars - you would meet a beautiful powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole, make your heart skip a beat (or stand still), make you misty, and fly you to the moon (preferably on gossamer wings), where you would live totally satisfied forever.

In a certain sense, you do write to seduce the world, but when it happens, you begin to feel like a whore. The disparity between your life and your work turns out to be as great as ever. And the people seduced by your work are usually seduced by all the wrong reasons.

Did I want to dance? Of course I did and that's not all.

I quickly learned that a book carefully arranged before your face was a bulletproof shield, an asbestos wall, a cloak of invisibility. I learned to take refuge behind books, to become, as my mother and father called me, 'the absentminded professor-' They screamed at me, but I couldn't hear. I was reading. I was writing. I was safe.

She lives as if she is constantly on the brink of some great fulfillment. As if she were waiting for Prince Charming to take her away "from all this". All what? The solitude of living inside her own soul? The certainty of being herself instead of half of something else?

You go through life looking for a teacher and then when you find him, you become so dependent on him that you grow to hate him. Or else you wait for him to show his weakness and then you despise him for being human.

Uno no tiene por qué pedir disculpas si quiere ser el dueño de su propia alma... para bien o para mal. Cuando ya todo se ha dicho y hecho, es todo cuanto queda.

At times I hardly can believe in you. Except this ache, this longing in my gut, this emptiness which theorizes you because if there is emptiness this deep, there must be fullness somewhere.

I find myself wondering how many other memories are hidden from me in the recesses of my own brain; indeed my own brain will seem to be the last great terra incognita, and I will be filled with wonder at the prospect of some day discovering new worlds there. Imagine the lost continent of Atlantis and all the submerged islands of childhood right there waiting to be found. The inner space we have never adequately explored. The worlds within worlds within worlds. And the marvelous thing is that they are waiting for us. If we fail to discover them, it is only because we haven't yet built the right vehicle - spaceship or submarine or poem - which will take us to them. It's for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write? My writing is the submarine or spaceship which takes me to the unknown worlds within my head. And the adventure is endless and inexhaustible. If I learn to build the right vehicle, then I can discover even more territories. And each new poem is a new vehicle, designed to delve a little deeper (or fly a little higher) than the one before.

People don't complete us. We complete ourselves. If we haven't the power to complete ourselves, the search for love becomes a search for self-annihilation; and then we try to convince ourselves that self-annihilation is love.

It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American.

A person's not free if their freedom has to be "given".

Yet a man assumes that a woman’s refusal is just part of a game. Or, at any rate, a lot of men assume that. When a man says no, it’s no. When a woman says no, it’s yes, or at least maybe. There is even a joke to that effect. And little by little, women begin to believe in this view of themselves. Finally, after centuries of living under the shadow of such assumptions, they no longer know what they want and can never make up their minds about anything. And men, of course, compound the problem by mocking them for their indecisiveness and blaming it on biology, hormones, premenstrual tension.

Somehow the idea of bearing his baby angers me. Let him bear his own baby! If I have a baby I want it to be all mine. A girl like me, but better. A girl who'll also be able to have her own babies. It is not having babies in itself which seems unfair, but having babies for men. Babies who get their names. Babies who lock you by means of love to a man you have to please and serve on pain of abandonment. And love, after all, is the strongest lock. The one that chafes hardest and wears longest. And then I would be trapped for good. The hostage of my own feelings and my own child.

I was glowing with health and well-being, as a woman will glow when she’s been fucked four times in one day by two different men,

Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.

Nothing human was worth denying. Even if it was unspeakably ugly, we could learn from it, couldn't we? Or could we? I never questioned that at all.

La verdad es que las fantasías, fantasías son y una no puede vivir extasiada todos los días del año. Incluso si das un portazo y te largas, incluso si jodes con todo el mundo a la vista, no te acercas más a la libertad necesariamente.

Bullshit. You say love—but you mean security. Well, there’s no such thing as security. Even if you go home to your safe little husband—there’s no telling that he won’t drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow or piss off with another bird or just plain stop loving you. Can you read the future? Can you predict fate? What makes you think your security is so secure? All that’s sure is that if you pass up this experience, you’ll never get another chance at it. Death’s definitive, as you said yesterday.

Novices in the arts think you have to start with inspiration to write or paint or compose. In fact, you only have to start. Inspiration comes if you continue. Make the commitment to sit still in solitude several hours a day and inevitably your muse will visit.

I would like to have a child. A very wise and witty little girl who’d grow up to be the woman I could never be. A very independent little girl with no scars on the brain or the psyche.... A little girl who said what she meant and meant what she said. A little girl who was neither bitchy nor mealy-mouthed.... What I really wanted was to give birth to myself—the little girl I might have been in a different family, a different world.” —Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

But what was so great about marriage? I had been married and married. It had its good points, but it also had its bad. The virtues of marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead. Almost anything had to be an improvement on hustling for your own keep at some low-paid job and fighting off unattractive men in your spare time while desperately trying to ferret out the attractive ones. Though I've no doubt that being single is just as lonely for a man, it doesn't have the added extra wallop of being downright dangerous, and it doesn't automatically imply poverty and the unquestioned status of a social pariah. Would most women get married if they knew what it meant? I think of young women following their husbands wherever their husbands follow their jobs. I think of them suddenly finding themselves miles away from friends and family, I think of them living in places where they can't work, where they can't speak the language. I think of them making babies out of their loneliness and boredom and not knowing why. I think of their men always harried and exhausted from being on the make. I think of them seeing each other less after marriage than before. I think of them falling into bed too exhausted to screw. I think of them farther apart in the first year of marriage than they ever imagined two people could be when they were courting. And then I think of the fantasies starting. He is eyeing the fourteen-year-old postnymphets in bikinis. She covets the TV repairman. The baby gets sick and she makes it with the pediatrician. He is fucking his masochistic little secretary who reads Cosmopolitan and things herself a swinger. Not: when did it all go wrong? But: when was it ever right? ....... I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.

You’re afraid he’ll leave you and you’ll fall apart. You don’t know that you can get along without him and you’re afraid to find out because then your whole potty theory will come tumbling down. You’ll have to stop thinking of yourself as weak and dependent and you hate that.

I had noticed, for example, how all my infatuations dissolved as soon as I really became friends with a man, became sympathetic to his problems, listened to him kvetch about his wife, or ex-wives, his mother, his children. After that I would like him, perhaps even love him—but without passion.

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul.

A good woman would have given her life to the care and feeding of her husband's madness. I was not a good woman. I had too many other things to do.

paroxysms

Y el problema es que si no arriesgas nada, arriesgas aún más.

Why should a bad marriage have been so much more compelling than no marriage? Why had I clung to my misery so? Why did I believe it was all I had?

I am nailed to the cross of my imagination.

Why had I clung to my misery so? Why did I believe it was all I had?

If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves!

about sanity, about society. But it was easy to poke fun at him. “Schizophrenics were the true poets,” Erica Jong would joke in Fear of Flying. “Every raving lunatic was Rilke.

We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl in the bourgeois box.

Children are no antidote to loneliness.

Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead.' - character Idadora Wing in Erica Jong's novel 'Fear of Flying

want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

What we remember lacks the hard edge of fact. To help us along we create little fictions, highly subtle and individual scenarios which clarify and shape our experience. The remembered event becomes a fiction, a structure made to accommodate certain feelings. This is obvious to me. If it weren’t for these structures, art would be too personal for the artist to create, much less for the audience to grasp. Even film, the most literal of all the arts, is edited. —Jerzy Kosinski

What all the ads and all the whoreoscopes seemed to imply was that if only you were narcissistic enough, if only you took proper care of your smells, your hair, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, and your choice of Scotch in bars—you would meet a beautiful, powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole, make your heart skip a beat (or stand still), make you misty, and fly you to the moon (preferably on gossamer wings), where you would live totally satisfied forever.

[Daughter], I want to release you. IF you hate me or want to reject me, I understand. If you curse me, then want to atone, I also understand. I expect to be your home plate: kicked, scuffed, but always returned to. I expect to be the earth from which you spring. But if I release you too much, what will you have to fight against? You need my acceptance, but you may need my resistance more. I promise to stand firm while you come and go. I promise unwavering live while you experiment with hate. Hate is energy too -- sometimes brighter-burning energy than love. Hate is often the precondition for freedom. No matter how I try to disappear, I fear I cast too big a shadow. I would erase that shadow if I could. but if I erased it, how would you know your own shadow? And with no shadow, how would you ever fly? I want to release you from the fears that bound me, yet I know you can only release yourself. I stand here wearing my catcher's padding. I pray you won't need me to catch you if you fall. But I'm here waiting anyway. Freedom is full of fear. But fear isn't the worst thing we face. Paralysis is.

think about how impossible it is to explain to the young what happens when you know you’re not immune from death. Everything changes. You look at the world differently. When you’re young, you have no perspective. You think life lasts forever—days and months and years stretching out to infinity. You think you don’t have to choose. You think you can waste time doing drugs and alcohol. You think time will always be on your side. But time, once your friend, becomes your enemy. It gallops by as you get older. Holidays come faster and faster. Years fly off the calendar as in old movies. All you long for is to go back and do it all over, correct the mistakes,

          The man under the bed           The man who has been there for years waiting           The man who waits for my floating bare foot           The man who is silent as dustballs riding the darkness           The man whose breath is the breathing of small white butterflies           The man whose breathing I hear when I pick up the phone           The man in the mirror whose breath blackens silver           The boneman in closets who rattles the mothballs           The man at the end of the end of the line           I met him tonight I always meet him           He stands in the amber air of a bar           When the shrimp curl like beckoning fingers           ride through the air on their toothpick skewers           When the ice cracks & I am about to fall through           he arranges his face           around its hollows           he opens his pupilless eyes at me           For years he has waited to drag me down           & now he tells me           he has only waited to take me home           We waltz through the street like death & the maiden           We float through the wall of the wall of my room           If he’s my dream he will fold back into my body           His breath writes letters of mist on the glass of my cheeks           I wrap myself around him like the darkness           I breathe into his mouth           & make him real

It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present, how much of daily life is usually spent making plans and attempting to control the future. Never mind that you have no control over it. The idea of the future is our greatest entertainment, amusement, and time-killer.

I would roam through the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for one woman artist to show me the way. Mary Cassatt? Berthe Morisot? Why was it that so many women artists who had renounced having children could then paint nothing but mothers and children? It was hopeless. If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity (and had Walter Mittyish fantasies of escape) or you longed for domesticity in all your art. You could never escape your femaleness. You had conflict written in your very blood.

In striving to fulfill our identities as women, it's important not to confound the various passages of life with each other. What we may need in girlhood or adolescence are not the same qualities we need in maturity. The task of adolescence is to leave home. And women in a sexist society have chronically found this hard to do. Our biology has reinforced the very dependence which our minds have been able to fly beyond. Patriarchal practices like arranged marriages, female sexual mutilation and the denial of abortion have encouraged us to glorify not-leaving as a self-protective strategy. No wonder our creative heroines had to find strategies for leaving. Those who were heterosexual devised the strategy of falling for bad boys as a primal means of separation. We make a mistake in thinking they were only victims. They were adventurers first. That they became victims was not their intent. Sylvia Plath was not merely a masochist but a bold adventurer who perhaps got more than she bargained for. As I get older, I come to understand that the seemingly self-destructive obsessions of my various younger lives were not only self-destructive. They were also self-creative. All through the stages of our lives, we go through transformations that may only manifest themselves when they are safely over. The rebels and bad boys I loved were the harbingers of my loving those very qualities in myself. I loved and left the bad boys, but I thank them for helping to make me the strong survivor I am today.

Dorian Fairchester Faddington IV was a promiscuous poetaster of whom even his best friends declared that he "went from bed to verse." Though he was sexually omnivorous and on occasion preferred camels, like nine out of ten doctors, ordinarily his taste ran to women. Hermione Fingerforth was a woman-or so she liked to assume-and whenever she ran into Dorian it was not long before their lips met in a succession of interesting poses. "The skin is the largest organ of the body," she once nonchalantly remarked to him as they were sunbathing in the nude together on the terrace of her penthouse in Flatbush. "Speak for yourself," he declared, leaping on top of her in a sudden paroxysm of passion. "Out, out of my damned twat!" she yelled, pushing him away and shielding her much-vaunted virginity with a silver-foil sun reflector. "I take it you want me to reflect on what I'm doing," he quipped. "Jesus Christ," she said crossly, "men are only interested in women in spurts.

I went for years not finishing anything because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.

I didn't want to risk being called all the things women writers (even good women writers) are called: clever, witty, bright, touching, but lacks scope.' I wanted to write about the whole world.

Sending works to magazines was entirely out of the question. Though I had been class poet in college and won the usual prizes, I was now convinced that nothing I was writing was good enough to send anywhere. I viewed editors of quarterlies as godlike creatures who would not even deign to read anything short of masterpieces. And I believed this despite the fact that I subscribed to quarterlies and religiously read the work in them. The work was often not good, I had to admit, but still, I was sure my own must be much much worse.

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but having no outlet, it implodes in a great fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul.

Si eres una hembra y tenías talento, la vida resultaba una trampa, no importaba el camino que eligieras. O te sumergías en la vida doméstica (y tenías fantasías a lo Walter Mitty para fugarte) o suspirabas por la vida doméstica en todo tu arte. Nunca podías escapar a la condición de hembra. El conflicto estaba escrito en tu mismísima sangre." Miedo a volar

paunchiness, hairy and dark. He was also a human cannonball

Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could.

You did not have to apologize for wanting to own your own soul. Your soul belonged to you—for better or worse. When all was said and done, it was all you had.

If some things could change, so could other things. What right had I to predict the future and predict it so nihilistically? As I got older I would probably change in hundreds of ways I couldn’t foresee. All I had to do was wait it out.

Swinging London had swung right by without stopping.

Mann ist was mann isst.

The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women. —D. H. Lawrence

I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway.

British toilet paper. A way of life. Coated. Refusing to absorb, soften, or bend (stiff upper lip).

Any one of my many shrinks could tell you that I was looking for my father. Wasn’t everyone? The explanation didn’t quite content me. Not that it seemed wrong: it just seemed too simple. Perhaps the search was really a kind of ritual in which the process was more important than the end. Perhaps it was a kind of quest. Perhaps there was no man at all, but just a mirage conjured by our longing and emptiness. When you go to sleep hungry you dream of eating. When you go to sleep with a full bladder you dream of getting up to pee. When you go to sleep horny you dream of getting laid. Maybe the impossible man was nothing more than a specter made of our own yearning. Maybe he was like the fearless intruder, the phantom rapist women expect to find under their bed or in their closets. Or maybe he was really death, the last lover.

It was clear to me that thinking yourself superior was a sure sign of being inferior and that thinking yourself extraordinary was a sure sign of being ordinary.

He shimmered in the mirrors. An infinite number of Adrians in beige corduroy trousers and plum-colored turtlenecks and brown suede jackets. An infinite number of dirty toenails in an infinite number of Indian sandals. An infinite number of meerschaum pipes between his beautiful curling lips. My zipless fuck? My man under the bed! Multiplied like the lovers in Last Year at Marienbad. Multiplied like Andy Warhol’s self-portraits. Multiplied like the Thousand and One Buddhas in the Temple at Kyoto. (Each Buddha has six arms, each arm has an extra eye … how many pricks did these millions of Adrians have? And each prick symbolizing the infinite wisdom and infinite compassion of God?)

I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed. I

You’re not a secretary; you’re a poet. What makes you think your life is going to be uncomplicated? What makes you think you can avoid all conflict? What makes you think you can avoid pain? Or passion? There’s something to be said for passion. Can’t you ever allow yourself and forgive yourself?

Non c'è niente di più terribile di un artista mancato. L'energia rimane, ma, priva com'è di una valvola di sfogo, implode in un gigantesco peto nero di rabbia che offusca tutte le finestre interne dell'anima. Anche se gli artisti di successo sono spesso orribili, non c'è niente di più crudele o vano di un artista fallito.

I don't believe in dying for causes. I don't believe in dying for poetry. Once I worshiped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old.

Walking home from work that night, I stopped in the Centicore Bookstore on State Street and wandered up and down the aisles. I saw a thin volume of poetry entitled Fruits and Vegetables by Erica Jong. (Jong had not come out with her novel Fear of Flying yet and was still unknown.) The first poem I opened to in the book was about cooking an eggplant!

If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity or you longed for domesticity in all your art.

Being unmarried in a man’s world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead.

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul.

Life has no plot. It is far more interesting than anything you can say about it because language, by its very nature, orders things and life really has no order. Even those writers who respect the beautiful anarchy of life and try to get it all into their books, wind up making it seem much more ordered than it ever was and do not, finally, tell the truth. Because no writer can ever tell the truth about life, namely that it is much more interesting than any book. And no writer can tell the truth about people--which is that they are much more interesting than any characters.

I had occasion to talk to Erica Jong, one of the most famous sex-positive feminists—“one of the most interviewed people in the world,” as she’s put it—on the thirtieth anniversary of her novel Fear of Flying. “I was standing in the shower the other day, picking up my shampoo,” she said. “It’s called ‘Dumb Blonde.’ I thought, thirty years ago you could not have sold this. I think we have lost consciousness of the way our culture demeans women.” She was quick to tell me that she “wouldn’t pass a law against the product or call the PC police.” But, she said, “let’s not kid ourselves that this is liberation. The women who buy the idea that flaunting your breasts in sequins is power—I mean, I’m for all that stuff—but let’s not get so into the tits and ass that we don’t notice how far we haven’t come. Let’s not confuse that with real power. I don’t like to see women fooled.

Era come se lo stomaco pensasse di essere il cuore. E non importava quanto lo riempissi... di uomini, di libri, di cibo, di biscotti allo zenzero a forma di uomo, di poesie a forma di uomo e di uomini a forma di poesie... rifiutava di calmarsi. Senza fondo... ecco com'era. Ninfomania del cervello. Denutrizione del cuore.

L'ideale è un cauto ottimismo. Ma nel mio caso si tratta piuttosto di cauto pessimismo.