Bookmarker is a personal project by @dellsystem to help with retaining reading material. Source on GitHub.

The men were able to retreat from anxiety into a ready-made identity. They got their PhDs, married Joan, and went off to walk the carefully prepared road that had been assigned them. The women had no such luck. Who were they to identify with? Where were they to go? At Berkeley I know where they went. They fell into affairs with married professors, black activists, antisocial mathematicians; or they hung out at the bars on the other side of Shattuck Avenue (Berkeley’s social divider), where one met adventurers rather than graduate students: bartenders, painters, poetic drifters, fishermen down from Alaska, pot growers in from Oregon. Their lives were fractured. By day they were absorbed by Renaissance poetry and the life of the English department; by night they slept with men who crossed Shattuck Avenue on a twenty-four-hour visa. Sexual adventure was an event that only rarely converted into experience. In some important way these women remained as innocent of life, of their own lives, as did Mark and Joan whiling the years away in one remote university town or another.

—p.131 Fierce Attachments (1) by Vivian Gornick 4 months, 3 weeks ago