Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds

Arnold smiled slightly, his eyes cast down.

“And that actually is a way of understanding how marriage is a preparation for divorce,” Agnes went on. “It’s a preparation for the time when you won’t need another person in order to think.” She said that maybe that would be the title of her book about marriage: “Marriage Is a Preparation for Divorce.” Sh

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Agnes said, “I’m, like, O.K., what is jealousy? Am I entitled to feel it? Is there something I’m getting right in feeling this way?” Baraz wants to comfort her. “I feel like she’s treating herself as a guinea pig or a case study,” Baraz told me, “and I want to relate to her as a person I care about who is in distress.” But Agnes is impatient with t

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A common refrain in their fights was whether Arnold, who became an assistant professor in 2021, should aspire to more. Agnes felt that he could write an extraordinary book about Aristotle, but he was content to read the texts and share his interpretations with his students. “Arnold fundamentally sees life as, like, you’re supposed to find a place o

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