Food for pleasure, and not just nourishment, is best cooked in one's own kitchen and eaten with the feet under one's own table.-Nicolas Freeling (The Kitchen Book)While the meal I'm about to share was not prepared in my own kitchen, I think it's safe to say that Mr. Freeling would nevertheless have approved of how…
...If I had another lifeI would want to spend it all/on some unstinting happiness.I would be a fox, or a treefull of waving branches.I wouldn't mind being a rosein a field of roses.Fear has not yet occurred to them,/nor ambition.Reason they have not yet thought of.Neither do they ask how long they/must be roses, and…
The concept of stairs in the traditional sense was also something the world no longer needed. Stairs represented a teleological view of the universe, of one thing leading to another, whereas now everyone knew that one thing didn't lead to another but often nowhere at all.-Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)Maybe things can sometimes lead nowhere, but, in…
Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the languages is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of…
And what were they, all, all those torments of the past! Everything, even his crime, even his sentence and exile, seemed to him now, in the first impulse, to be some strange, external fact, as if it had not even happened to him. However, that evening he could not think long or continuously of anything,…
Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quite in droves, unable to adopt the speed of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down:…
The resultant internal conflict is nowhere more clearly seen than in Crime and Punishment. The characters seem drawn from an imagined hell and yet...'We have never met them, but they are mysteriously familiar to us. We understand and love them, and finally we recognize ourselves in them. This is because they are no more abnormal…
You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You…
Dining with Dostoevsky 