For the millions of us who live glued to computer keyboards at work and TV monitors at home, food may be more than entertainment. It may be the only sensual experience left.
We need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.
The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.
You still don’t like the idea of gay marriage? Then, as my friend the economist Julianne Malveaux says: Don’t marry a gay person. Case closed, problem solved.
In matters of the heart as well, a certain level of negativity and suspicion is universally recommended. You may try to project a thoroughly positive outlook in order to attract a potential boyfriend, but you are also advised to Google him.
Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.
Wars produce warlike societies, which in turn make the world more dangerous for other societies, which are thus recruited into being war-prone themselves.
Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.
What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you’re really selling is your life.
When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.
In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn’t developed space travel were mere prehistory – horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene – and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.
A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness.
You can think of death bitterly or with resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible measure to postpone it. Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.
My aim here was much more straightforward and objective – just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day. Besides, I’ve had enough unchosen encounters with poverty in my lifetime to know it’s not a place you would want to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear.
You can talk about depression as a “chemical imbalance” all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist – a “demon,” a “beast,” or a “black dog,” as Samuel Johnson called it. It could pounce at any time, even in the most innocuous setting.
I believe nothing. Belief is intellectual surrender; “faith” a state of willed self-delusion.
But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.
But who could resist the erotic lives of atoms and molecules – the violent passion of electrostatic attractions, the comfortable mutuality of covalent bonds, the gentle air kisses of van der Waals forces? The rules governing the couplings and uncouplings of tiny particles seemed to me as fascinating as the kinship rules of what we still called “primitive” societies – with the revulsion of like-charged particles, for example, functioning as a kind of incest taboo.
If there is a lesson here it has to do with humility. For all our vaunted intelligence and complexity, we are not the sole authors of our destinies or of anything else. You may exercise diligently, eat a medically fashionable diet, and still die of a sting from an irritated bee. You may be a slim, toned paragon of wellness, and still a macrophage within your body may decide to throw in its lot with an incipient tumor.
I had discovered that writing – with whatever instrument – was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do.