Shakespeare wanted us to struggle with an inscrutable villain. With evil itself. Our age equates evil with psychopathy, pointing to a physiological absence of the brain structures and biochemicals that give us empathy.
“Check in on your single friends,” freshly elected Vice President Kamala Harris urged last Thanksgiving. Five simple words, but behind them a sea change in how we organize our common lives.
Nothing is as simple, as pure, or as absolute as we want it to be. And there is intrigue and rich meaning in all these layers we cover over.
There is strength in bitchiness. Which takes me to the root of my aversion: Why, in women, was (and is) strength equated with meanness?
What I knew was the surface. But Eleanor, David Michaelis’s recent biography, let me step into her heart. Now I could imagine how she ached for her father’s company, how her relatives’ comments must have stung, how her school days charged her mind and set it in perpetual motion. How awkward it was for her to show tenderness, how desperately she craved it. How fully she became herself and what power that gave her.
We need to give each other rooms. Giving “space” can be necessary, but space also needs to be enclosed; to protect what lies within its walls.
These whips are called “disciplines” or “scourges.” Some are made of leather; his seems gentler, a coarse fine rope. It is the pale tan of wheat, which makes the bloodstain more prominent.
I suppose I should find women-with-guns refreshing. At least there is some power to it. But why did an industry spring up around pretending that women are something other than who we are? Is who we are that dull, that devoid of erotic appeal?
Now I remember to reset our vintage clocks, and we grin about it—but I still struggle with the mnemonic. “Fall forward” sounds just as likely to me as “Fall back.”
If we were truly okay with every possible permutation of gender, sexuality, and anatomy, language might cease to be a minefield. Someone who was male or nonbinary but had the anatomy for childbearing could give birth and lactate and call it either breast or chestfeeding, as they liked.
It is easy to say goodbye to five of the six Seuss books on the estate’s pull list; they are not beloved.
Though I rarely drive farther than a few miles from home, I am paying inordinate attention to the weather forecast. Maybe this is because I have been cut off for a year from other places I used to feel part of, or because I spend so much more time outside now.But I could also be succumbing to family tradition.