Jane Hong

“Once, after I somehow came across the word “circumjoviating” and had to look it up—it means “orbiting around Jupiter”—I challenged him to define it. He thought for perhaps five seconds, then guessed, logically and sublimely: “avoiding God.” I have used it that way ever since then—for what other word so concisely describes the experience of ducking one’s deity or conscience or responsibilities? Like so much of what I got from my father, it is a gift of ethics inside a gift of language. And so it came back to me after he died, when I sat there impassively and watched it start to define me: avoiding work, avoiding books, avoiding time, avoiding joy, avoiding reality. I”
― Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir