Bee > Recent Status Updates

“Until then I’d had no idea how quickly grace can vanish from a person, or that you can voluntarily give up on seduction, turn off all the lights and shut all the windows of your life, waiting for an unlikely tomorrow.”

“We were all playing out our dream lives, which were far more important and real than the ones we lived.
Fire. Fire. For purification, a fresh start. Fire like a threat in flammable cités.”

“In… Feb. 1794, a.. 3-man delegation arrived in Paris after an arduous journey from Saint-Domingue: Jean-Baptiste Belley, a black native of Senegal and a former slave; Jean-Baptiste Mills, a free Saint-Dominguan..; and Louis-Pierre Dufay, a white Frenchman… made a passionate argument for the abolition of slavery… Then in a single vote, the government became the first in history to abolish slavery.”

“Among the most ubiquitous changes imposed in the first days of the French Republic was the use of the words ‘Citizen’ and ‘Citizeness’ to replace all previous titles, including the most basic ‘Monsieur’ and ‘Madame’… ‘Citizen is a sacred word.’.. the ultimate revolutionary goal should be to emulate the Romans, who did not use any honorifics at all, not even the sacred word ‘citizen’.”

“Eighteen pillars of the most beautiful marble, serpentine tiles and porphyry inlays, four perfect arches that bear a vertiginous dome.”

"As for me, I'll continue to live in my glass house, where at all hours you can see who comes to visit, where everything hanging from the ceiling and on the walls is held there as if by magic, where I sleep at night in a glass bed under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear to me etched by a diamond."