How absolute the knave is! we must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. By the Lord Horatio, this three years I have taken note of it, the age is grown so picked, that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of our courtier, he galls his kibe. How long hast thou been a grave digger?
— Hamlet (V.i.12-17)
What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.
— Joseph Epstein, wsj
And nevertheless he was happy. For happiness, he told himself, does not consist in being loved; that merely gratifies one’s vanity and is mingled with repugnance. Happiness consists in loving — and perhaps snatching a few little moments of illusory nearness to the beloved. And he inwardly noted down this reflection, thought out all its implications and savored it to its very depths.
— Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger
— HGNP
(Thank you, Sarpvinash, for this)
That evening her image remained imprinted on his mind: her thick blond tresses, her rather narrowly cut laughing blue eyes, the delicate hint of freckles across the bridge of her nose. The timbre of her voice haunted him and he could not sleep; he tried softly to imitate the particular way she had pronounced that insignificant word, and a tremor ran through him as he did so. He knew from experience that this was love. And he knew only too well that love would cost him much pain, distress and humiliation; he knew also that it destroys the lover’s peace of mind, flooding his heart with music and leaving him no time to form and shape his experience, to recollect it in tranquility and forge it into a whole. Nevertheless he accepted this love with joy, abandoning himself to it utterly and nourishing it with all the strength of his spirit; for he knew that it would enrich him and make him more fully alive — and he longed to be enriched and more fully alive, rather than to recollect things in tranquility and forge them into a whole . . .
— Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger
Our human race can only achieve happiness if love reaches its conclusion . . .
When a lover of boys, or any other type of person, meets that very person who is his other half, he is overwhelmed, to an amazing extent, with affection, concern and love. The two don’t want to spend any time apart from each other. These are people who live out whole lifetimes together, but still couldn’t say what it is they want from each other. I mean, no one could think that it’s just sexual intercourse they want, and that this is the reason why they find such joy in each other’s company and attach such importance to this. It is clear that each of them has some wish in his mind that he can’t articulate. Instead, like an oracle, he half-grasps what he wants and obscurely hints at it. Imagine that Hephaestus with his tools stood over them while they were lying together and asked: “What is it, humans, that you want from each other?” If they didn’t know, imagine what he asked next: “Is this what you desire, to be together so completely that you’re never apart from each other night and day? If this is what you desire, I’m prepared to fuse and weld you together, so that the two of you become one. Then the two of you would live a shared life, as long as you live, since you are one person; and when you died, you would have a shared death in Hades, as one person instead of two. But see if this is what you long for, and if achieving this state satisfies you.” We know that no one who heard this offer would turn it down and it would become apparent that no one wanted anything else. Everyone would think that what he was hearing now was just what he’d longed for all this time: to come together and be fused with the one he loved and become one instead of two. The reason is that this is our original natural state and we used to be whole creatures: “love” is the name for the desire and pursuit of wholeness.
— Aristophanes
Plato, The Symposium
The origin of the concept of “Platonic love” (which postdates Plato by several centuries) was not Plato’s belief that sex should be absent from gay affairs but his conviction that only love between persons of the same gender could transcend sex.
— John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety. It was like one of those big cast-iron dishes with an electric clapper that send schoolchildren into the street in fire drills. By now it had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of “bell ringing” but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have to leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for as long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of their consciousness of the sound. Which consciousness was particularly acute when the weather itself was in an anxious mood. Then Enid and Alfred — she on her knees in the dining room opening drawers, he in the basement surveying the disastrous Ping-Pong table — each felt near to exploding with anxiety.
— Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
Probably the most entertaining efforts to conceal homosexuality from the public have been undertaken by the editors of the Loeb Classics, the standard collection of Greek and Latin classical texts with English translation. Until very recently many sections of Greek works in this series dealing with overt homosexuality were translated not into English but Latin, and some explicit passages in Latin found their way into Italian. In addition to the ambiguous comment this procedure makes on the morals of Italian readers, it has the curious effect of highlighting every salacious passage in the major classics, since the interested reader (with appropriate linguistic skills) has only to skim the English translation looking for Latin or Italian. The practice applied equally to profane and sacred writers: even Christian condemnations of homosexual acts were deemed too provocative for English readers.
— John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
It’s the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.
— Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
Enid could hear Alfred upstairs now, opening and closing drawers. He became agitated whenever they were going to see their children. Seeing their children was the only thing he seemed to care about anymore.
In the streaklessly clean windows of the dining room there was chaos. The berserk wind, the negating shadows. Enid had looked everywhere for the letter from the Axon Corporation, and she couldn’t find it.
Alfred was standing in the master bedroom wondering why the drawers of his dresser were open, who had opened them, whether he had opened them himself. He couldn’t help blaming Enid for his confusion. For witnessing it into existence. For existing, herself, as a person who could have opened these drawers.
“Al? What are you doing?”
He turned to the doorway where she’d appeared. He began a sentence: “I am — ” but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn’t quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren’t uniform, weren’t an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he’d encountered the word “crepuscular” in McKay’s Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he’d seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn’t just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he’d sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he’d entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods — “packing my suitcase,” he heard himself say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He’d betrayed nothing.
But Enid had spoken again. The audiologist had said that he was mildly impaired. He frowned at her, not following.
“It’s Thursday,” she said, louder. “We’re not leaving until Saturday.”
“Saturday!” he echoed.
She berated him then, and for a while the crepuscular birds retreated, but outside the wind had blown the sun out, and it was getting very cold.
— Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
LOS ANGELES—According to a study released Wednesday by the California Pain Medicine Center, subjects suffering from male- pattern baldness were found to experience a level of physical pain at least seven times more intense than that experienced by women during childbirth. “Clinical studies show that as hair gradually separates from the scalp, men experience intensifying waves of all-consuming pain equivalent to having their insides ripped out through the thousands of tiny follicles on their head,” said Vincent Kwan, who led the all-male research team that carried out the study. “While strong uterine contractions and tearing of the vaginal walls undoubtedly cause a degree of discomfort among women in labor, balding men would give anything to experience those sensations instead of lying awake and suffering all night as their hair thins.” Kwan stated that men’s remarkable ability to endure years of excruciating agony without the aid of epidurals or other powerful analgesics was a testament to the sex’s unrivaled tolerance for pain.
The Floating Library 