Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight is a masterpiece of complex an nuanced thinking not only about a significant problem that faces women but about our culture. A very valuable book.
Far more frightening than the thought of dying was the experience of erasure already occurring in my life. My fear of becoming someone who did not count.
We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know.
Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.
Waging war is not a primary physical need.
War starts in the mind, not in the body.
It is a grief over the fate of the Earth that contains within it a joyful hope, that we might reclaim this Earth.
Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.
One can find traces of every life in each life.
There is always a time to make right what is wrong.
Although the many virtues that courtesans possessed were employed to defy circumstances, the role they played depended on the same circumstances over which they triumphed- conditions which to, fortunately for modern women, no longer exist.
Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.
But still, the other voice, the intuitive, returns, like grass forcing its way through concrete.
Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal. Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self.
I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves.
We are nature. We are nature seeing nature. The red-winged blackbird flies in us.
What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.
Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture’s image of what is female.
Philosophy means nothing unless it is connected to birth, death, and the continuance of life. Anytime you are going to build a society that works, you have to begin from nature and the body.
At the museum a troubled woman destroys a sand painting meticulously created over days by Tibetan monks. The monks are not disturbed. The work is a meditation. They simply begin again.