Monsters

There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.”

That is: Love is not reliant on judgment, but on a decision to set judgment aside. Love is anarchy. Love is chaos. We don’t love the deserving; we love flawed and imperfect human beings, in an emotional logic that belongs to an entirely different weather system than the chilly climate of reason.

What do we do about the terrible people we love? That question comes with another question nestled inside it: how awful can we be, before people stop loving us?

The problem is that you still love her. How often this describes our relationships with our families, our spouses, sometimes even our children. It’s the problem and it’s the solution, this durable nature of love, the way it withstands all the shit we throw at it, the bad behavior, the disappointments, the tantrums, the betrayals.

The problem is that you still love her.

Reading is an unambiguously good thing in a life that’s been filled with mixed blessings.

what do we do about the monstrous people we love?

The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.

The bad celebrity, once again, reinforces the idea of the good celebrity, a thing that doesn’t exist, because celebrities are not agents of morality, they’re reproducible images.