Sarah

“I found his disdain exciting. He projected a radical social freedom I felt I could not access for myself. The man did not soften the edges of his actions and felt free to wield his principles like a weapon and, although I was the recipient of the blow, I welcomed it as instructional. I'd be further in life if I'd claimed more freedom and had not so fully absorbed the lesson that my social value depended on my being com-promising, deferential, small.

The man's cruelty brought comfort; it shored up the story I told myself about myself and validated my deepest suspicion: I was invisible. The indifferent man gifted me the satisfaction of being right.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“My familiar defense mechanism was taking over, which was to feel superior while abstracting to theory. I could convince myself that I was above, in both taste and intelligence, the experience of a pop concert. Anything of such mass appeal must be, by definition, lacking —merely facile pleasure, or what British philosopher Bernard Bosanquet called easy beauty.

Easy beauty was apparent and unchallenging: "A simple tune; a simple spatial rhythm ... a rose; a youthful face, or the human form in its prime, all these afford a plain straightforward pleasure...."

Conversely, difficult beauty, wrote Bosanquet, required more time, patience, and a higher amount of concentration. Our ability to appreciate difficult beauty depended on our education, insight, endurance, and our capacity for attention. In difficult beauty, one often encounters intricacy, tension, and width. The intricacy of a difficult aesthetic object can provoke resentment and disgust in us if we are unable to resolve and classify the complex elements of the object. Difficult beauty also required us to stay in a state of "high tension of feeling," and it is our own weakness-the "weakness of the spectators," says Bosanquet, taking the phrase from Aristotle— that causes us to shrink from the challenge of difficult beauty. "The capacity to endure and enjoy feeling at high tension is somewhat rare.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“I want to get down something T.S. Eliot said: Human beings are capable of passions that human experience can never live up to.”
― Sigrid Nunez, A Feather on the Breath of God

“The famed MRS degree, because in practice, a female brain is worth nothing. Four lobes of the cerebrum, and I have sometimes imagined one of mine labeled RAGE.”
― Weike Wang, Joan Is Okay