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Presently he reaches out his hand and touches her hip. . . . He runs his fingers over her hip and feels the stretch marks there. They are like roads, and he traces them in her flesh. He runs his fingers back and forth, first one, then another. They run everywhere in her flesh, dozens, perhaps hun…

Hannah Arendt could not avail herself of Jaspers's solution. She had been the student, not the teacher, and she had slept with Heidegger. Worship of the transcendent mind, once eroticized, can (and for her I believe it did) become a thing one bonds with somewhere in the nerve endings. Once an exper…

For such people, Heidegger was a visionary, a man surrounded by an aura, imbued with the dark power of ''thinking." This astonishing gift placed him, in the imagination of almost everyone who knew him, beyond ordinary judgment. To do it as he did it was to climb Mount Olympus. Reading him, or lis…

Hannah Arendt became Martin Heidegger's student at the University of Marburg in 1924. She was eighteen years old. He was thirty-five and already famous in university circles. (Three years later, when Being and Time was published, he would be hailed as a major philosopher). She was beautiful and, ne…

She told herself that she would not contact him, that February in 1950, but the minute she reached Freiburg she picked up the phone. Within hours he was at the hotel. Two days later she wrote to him,

When the waiter announced your name it was as though time had stopped. Then, in a flash, I bec…