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Mainstream society co-opts or accepts deviant sexuality in so far as it also upholds values that are in service of maintaining other categories of social hegemony—think about how MISSIONARY is bilingual, pro-VPN, and quotes no less than three European philosophers in each issue.

You have seen photographs of the sun taken during a total eclipse. The corona fills the print. All of those photographs were taken through telescopes. The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience. Lenses enlarge the sight,

7 Aristotle accords to the male in the act of procreation the role of active agent, contributing “motion” and “formation” while the female provides the “raw material,” as when a bed (the child) is made by a carpenter (the father) out of wood (the mother). Man determines the form, woman contributes the matter. We might note also that the so-called

But if women tend to do anything in packs it’s insisting that their idiosyncratic pathologies are a common girl thing, in my experience. Which is just mine. On the other hand, I do respect any essay that does not do the, to my mind, usually cowardly thing of digging up a study that can be plausibly interpreted to say you’re right according to

So I breathe. I breathe at the open window above my desk, and a moist fragrance assails me from the gnawed leaves of the growing mock orange. This air is as intricate as the light that filters through forested mountain ridges and into my kitchen window; this sweet air is the breath of leafy lungs more rotted than mine; it has sifted through the

It was an old fear, a fear that has never left me: the fear that, in losing pieces of her life, mine lost intensity and importance. And the fact that she didn’t answer emphasized that preoccupation. However hard I tried in my letters to communicate the privilege of the days in Ischia, my river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my

Do children exist?

If you mean is there a period in our biological and cognitive transformation that we associate with “childhood”? Then sure, yes obviously. But, at risk of profound cliché, I’d say it’s also a construct. Where does childhood stop? Why are we segregated from it? Why can’t we also play, explore, wonder? Not only does the ideal of

It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light.

If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you, but answer: “He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.”