Intimations: Six Essays

But the answer “black” immediately carries a heavy load, and a number of potentially violent actions—that would have been unlikely otherwise—suddenly become psychologically possible. You don’t just lecture or book this type of body or take it down to the station. It would have no respect for you if you did that—after all, it is more than used to ro

The fact that school is closed for Ben’s boy is a genuine emergency; for me it is an inconvenience only. I know Ben knows this, but out of what I interpret as his customary optimism and civility and desire to maintain symmetry, he allows me to complain with him, as if my husband or I cannot work from home, or lose a day’s work, without disaster. As

A woman in her forties has lived long enough to see the dreams of childhood—hoverboards!—appear in the streets. She has lived long enough to see the social protections of her youth, which had not seemed to her dreams, but rather mundane realities—universal health care, free university education, decent public housing*—all now recast as revolutionar

Look at them scuttling like rats from a sinking ship . . . and what they running from? A COLD? These people are crazy. Just wash your damn hands! Ain’t complicated. They out here acting like it’s THE END OF THE WORLD. These people make me laugh. You see me running? I’m not scared of this shit! I’m gonna be scared of the flu? In what world? No, no,

Although the most powerful art, it sometimes seems to me, is an experience and a going-through; it is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself, and for this reason has perhaps been more frequently created by people who feel themselves to be completely alone in this world—and therefore wholly focused on the task at hand

I’d make up hard things to do, or things to abstain from. Artificial limits and so on. Running is what I know. Writing is what I know. Conceiving self-implemented schedules: teaching day, reading day, writing day, repeat. What a dry, sad, small idea of a life. And how exposed it looks, now that the people I love are in the same room to witness the

He looked at the human beings he had chained up and noted that they seemed to be the type of people who wore chains. So unlike other people. Frighteningly unlike! Later, in his cotton fields, he had them whipped and then made them go back to work and thought, They can’t possibly feel as we do. You can whip them and they go back to work. And having

And yet, in my case, I can’t let it go: old habits die hard. I can’t rid myself of the need to do “something,” to make “something,” to feel that this new expanse of time hasn’t been “wasted.” Still, it’s nice to have company. Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do “something,” that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted

At the end of April, in a powerful essay by another writer, Ottessa Moshfegh, I read this line about love: “Without it, life is just ‘doing time.’” I don’t think she intended by this only romantic love, or parental love, or familial love or really any kind of love in particular. At least, I read it in the Platonic sense: Love with a capital L, an i