Crush
You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you've done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you're tired. You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for.
From the archives
·
2015
Go, Went, Gone
So listen, the owl says now: The more highly developed a society is, the more its written laws come to replace common sense. In Germany, I estimate that only two-thirds of our laws are still anchored in the emotional lives of the people, as it were. The other third are laws pure and simple, formulated with such a high level of precision and abstraction that all basis in human emotion has become superfluous and thus ceases to exist. Two thousand years ago, no one was more hospitable than the Teutons. Surely you are acquainted with the lovely section in Tacitus’s Germania devoted to our ancestors’ hospitality?
Yes, Richard says, nodding.
May I recall the passage in question for you?
You may.
The lawyer gets up, goes over to the bookshelf, his coattails flapping in the inexplicable office breeze, pulls his Tacitus off the shelf, and opens the small book at a page marked by a slip of paper.
Read more of this excerpt...
Go, Went, Gone
So listen, the owl says now: The more highly developed a society is, the more its written laws come to replace common sense. In Germany, I estimate that only two-thirds of our laws are still anchored in the emotional lives of the people, as it were. The other third are laws pure and simple, formulated with such a high level of precision and abstraction that all basis in human emotion has become superfluous and thus ceases to exist. Two thousand years ago, no one was more hospitable than the Teutons. Surely you are acquainted with the lovely section in Tacitus’s Germania devoted to our ancestors’ hospitality?
Yes, Richard says, nodding.
May I recall the passage in question for you?
You may.
The lawyer gets up, goes over to the bookshelf, his coattails flapping in the inexplicable office breeze, pulls his Tacitus off the shelf, and opens the small book at a page marked by a slip of paper.
Read more of this excerpt...
WORDS TO LIVE BY
“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.”
Catch 22 · Joseph Heller · 1961
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