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The male’s vocation is action; he needs to produce, fight, create, progress, go beyond himself toward the totality of the universe and the infinity of the future; but traditional marriage does not invite woman to transcend herself with him; it confines her in immanence.

but he recognized that each family functioned with its own impenetrable logic, so he resisted the urge to say anything.

seeing clearly is not her business: she was taught to accept masculine authority; she thus forgoes criticizing, examining, and judging for herself.

But the wife is not called to build a better world; the house, the bedroom, the dirty laundry, the wooden floors, are fixed things: she can do no more than rout out indefinitely the foul causes that creep in; she attacks the dust, stains, mud, and filth; she fights sin, she fights with Satan. But it is a sad destiny to have to repel an enemy

She regrets closing the doors of her home behind herself; as a young girl, the whole world was her kingdom; the forests belonged to her. Now she is confined to a restricted space; Nature is reduced to the size of a geranium pot; walls block out the horizon.

I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.

One of the many hypotheses coagulating in these early days of time-travel was that language informed experience—that we did not simply describe but create our world through language, like Adam in the Garden of Eden calling a spade a spade or whatever happens in Genesis.

and on succeeding some months later to the title, had set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing.