Lorde, “Hard Feelings” // Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters // Jenny Holzer, It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender from the “Survival” series // Alejandra Pizarnik, Extracting the Stone of Madness // Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life // Éphraïm Mikhaël, The Priest
“Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society’s double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women, they can become women much earlier – and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.”
— Susan Sontag, The Double Standard of Aging (1972)
Ask me again how the story should go. How much the underbelly of my garden held to bring forth spring, how much hunger I had to devour to get the sweetness I wanted from it. Did this devouring frighten you? I frightened myself in how much I promised to tell you if you asked me again about the water the water the water. What errors I made calculating the downward trajectory of memory rattling loose in the inhale, sharp in the shoulder blades exhaling like wings or whales or swizzles of light. Ask me again what I offered as a sacrifice to the rooster crowing his betrayal of morning. Forgiveness, what a sharp blade I press my body hard against.
In the Animal Garden of My Body, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
“Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.”
— Rupert Brooke, poet (b. 3 August 1887)
“The smell of coffee, white dust, tobacco and burnt bread, flowers with a fragrance of wine, and the crimson fruit, soft and overripe. A girl looking over her bare shoulder, with a flash of a smile, gold ear-rings showing from thick black hair brushed away from her face, long arms, a cigarette between her lips. Night like a great dark blanket, voices murmuring at a street corner, the air warm with tired flowers, and a hum from the sea.”
— Daphne du Maurier, from “I Will Never Be Young Again,” published c. 1932
“The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.”
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
