What I’m saying is nobody feels sorry for anybody anymore, nobody even pretends they do. Not even the President. It’s like it’s become unpatriotic.
But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them.
Over the phone, her laughter sounded like a warm bath.
The wounds of this ruptured nation lie open and ugly.
It wasn’t all a waste,” she told him over and over, holding on. Some things they got right, she was sure of that. The children. And for all the rest they wept, a merged keening that felt bottomless. For the years and years of things that didn’t exist, fantasies of flight where there was no flight. Nothing, really, but walking away on your own two feet. She felt tears frozen on her face.
I loved the time spent with him, but felt in some other chamber of my heart that it was time wasted. That I ought to be doing something else while there was time.
This is all going to scare us to death,” she said. “You and me. But we’re still going to have to do it.
It’s also interesting how it’s hard to be depressed around a three-year-old, if you’re paying attention. After a while, whatever you’re mooning about begins to seem like some elaborate adult invention.
We’re genetically predisposed toward certain behaviors that we’ve collectively decided are unhelpful; adultery and racism are possible examples. With reasonable success, we mitigate those impulses through civil codes, religious rituals, maternal warnings – the whole bag of tricks we call culture.
So much energy squandered in the unwinnable war waged by woman against the life-form she is.
But a spontaneous traveler inevitably will end up with the tummy gauge suddenly on empty, in some place where cuisine is not really the point: a museum cafeteria, or late-night snack bar across from the concert hall. Eating establishments where cuisine isn’t the point – is that a strange notion?
It was hard to see where all this could possibly go when it melted.
You know what really gets me?” I asked him. “How people call you ‘illegals.’ That just pisses me off, I don’t know how you can stand it. A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal?
At its heart, a genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them. Step one, probably, is to live on the land that feeds them, or at least on the same continent, ideally the same region. Step two is to be able to countenance the ideas of “food” and “dirt” in the same sentence, and three is to start poking into one’s supply chain to learn where things are coming from.
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
It’s terrible to lose somebody,” I said, “I mean, I don’t know firsthand, but I can imagine it must be. But it’s also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that’s got to be so much worse.
I realized that I had come to my own terms with the desert, but my soul was thirsty.
I didn’t wish to be comforted. “You can’t replace people you love with other people,” I said. “They’re not like old shoes or something.” “No. But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.
Religion has no place in the science classroom, where it may abridge students’ opportunities to learn the methods, discoveries, and explanatory hypotheses of science. Rather, its place is in the hearts of the men and women who study and then practice scientific exploration. Ethics can’t influence the outcome of an experiment, but they can serve as a useful adjunct to the questions that get asked in the first place, and to the applications thereafter.
It is in his absence I prosper.