Watching my daughter bob her head in time to the music, her fist pumping, I saw that she was in a moment all her own, along with others who followed the same band, all in moments of their own. It was a temporary collective, a bonding with strangers by the odd osmosis of music that grabs the young consciousness at almost every corner of being.
The title of Christopher Schaberg’s latest book is the perfect oxymoron: a frisson of thrilling risk followed by a grim grown-up reminder of constraint.
If you are alone, you have to reach out again and again to fill your life with meaningful connections. It is all terribly hard work. But it is nowhere near as hard as the alternative.
“The Taste of Things” has so many set-pieces of cooking that it feels like a dare to override the conventions of drama, which might seem to require that the meal get cooked, served, and eaten so the difficulties of relationship can be ennacted.
Research now shows that sustaining even a tiny white lie requires quite a bit of bandwidth, and people falter if they are tired or multitasking. Intuiting this, and lazy by nature, I vowed in my teens that I would find gentle ways to tell the truth.
Once you get in the habit, you soon discover that 7 am simply will not do. The 8 am hour is the stuff of horror, and 9 am is for louts with the blood pressure of a year-old marshmallow. Only 5:30 or earlier will suffice, when the gray light of dawn verges on the cusp of its full spectrum.
I think my sister was convinced that in order to be true to herself as a Black person she had to be anti-Israel. I understood that years ago and understand it now. Just as a point of racial pride, forget all the left-wing scaffolding. How could she be for a Jewish state when she thought about how Jews were instrumental in financially and ideologically supporting the Black Freedom movement in the United States?
My Name is Barbra gives readers a peek into the multi-faceted world of this famous, yet quite private woman, along with glimpses of those in her orbit. If you can get past the length, lack of an index, and extensive back-patting, you will enjoy yourself and learn a great deal.
Appreciation warms us. It is a gentle form of enthusiasm, which in the original Greek meant to be inspired by—even possessed by—a god. To have the divine inside you, glowing through the folds of viscera.
Chast was sweet and grateful but prone to trying something else. She insisted we go on, she would be fine in the chilly dark outside the massive locked building, which we ignored, no doubt to her discomfort.