Activity

Love-making is never simply pleasure. Sex manuals or feminist tracts which imply the infinite plasticity of position and pleasure, which counsel assertiveness, whether in bed or out, are dangerously destructive of imagination, of erotic and of spiritual ingenuity. The sexual exchange will be as com…

[...] On this particular occasion, I was aware of an intense aura emanating from someone whom I had never seen before, an intense, sexual aura, aimed precisely and accurately at my vacant being. “A man,” I wondered, “could there be a man in this meeting?” He looked weather-beaten, his flat, lined f…

However satisfying writing is—that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control—it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and the agony of loving. Of there being someone who loves and desires you, a…

The person who emerges in this brief autobiography is fierce, difficult, vulnerable, and unrelenting in her will to hope and in her devotion to what she calls “the shared cares of the finite world.” When she writes, thinking of Proust (“les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus”), that “the…

Dante’s poem is called The Divine Comedy. Sacrilegious poet! He usurped the impassible sceptre of Godhead to assign his friend and foe to the eternal terraces of the paradiso and the inferno. Does not all writing, even if it aims at Gelassenheit—to let things be—arrogate such illegitimate authority…