As Marx writes in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, we are distinguished from animals insofar as our wants extend beyond our needs

The urge to detach from every emotion, every judgment, every preference, every wish that the world were otherwise, every fit of temper, every bout of petulance, is the urge for death itself. To live at all is to yearn to be somewhere besides where we are, and to make every effort to get there.

But this isn’t possible, and I don’t really want it, anyway. If I were a part of you, I would not be apart from you and there would be no me in opposition to you, no you to elude me. Instead, I choose my waiting and the joy I find in surrender, in flinging myself at everything I encounter with the brutality of adoration.

In these fictions, as in reality, it is usually the men who command the greater share of power—but in at least some of them, as in some lucky lives, romantic equality is so potent that it overcomes asymmetries in situation.

Half-jokingly but mostly seriously, Millie tells her mother that “the self is an illusion and completely false.” She is so thoroughly decluttered that she has done away with all her commitments and finally even her personhood. “I think about how I spend my time. Where my interests lie,” she reflects. “The questions come naturally, as if supplied by

Responding to the Stoic philosophers who urged that we emulate nature in vacating our emotions, Nietzsche scoffs, Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power

“the word vacation, in fact, comes from the Latin vacare, meaning ‘to be empty.’”

The “democratization of culture” is a consolation prize, offered up in place of a political order in which people could exert meaningful control over the circumstances of their lives.

In a world of absolute equality, there would be no place left for derangements of disproportion. That is, there would be no place for the enchantments of maximalism—for encyclopedic novels of exorbitant length, for stylistic effusions, for camp confectionery. And of course there would be no place for love, which is nothing more or less than favorit