Thank you so much to everyone who commented and emailed and entrusted me with your secrets over the duration of my time as Aunt Acid. I had many more good questions than I could answer, especially for this last column. I will miss you.
If Cate Blanchett were your girlfriend, the two of you would sleep in lilac silk pajamas piped around the wrists and ankles in indigo. They would smell of actual lilacs, and they would be more comfortable than your oldest, softest t-shirts.
Many readers familiar with Charles Dickens' Great Expectations are aware that he originally wrote an ending where Pip and Estella meet years after their painful parting only to solemnly shake hands and go their separate ways again:
It was four years more, before I saw herself.
I know I can’t represent All Asians Everywhere any more than Jubilee could. I can’t give everyone everything they want and need in art, in stories. But I hope that those who don’t find what they need in my stories will find it elsewhere, that we’ll keep working toward having a variety of superheroes to choose favorites from.
Right-ho, we're all relatively familiar with the story of the ant and the grasshopper, wherein the grasshopper plays the violin instead of farming, I guess, and then in the winter the ant reminds him that you have to farm if you want to live through the solstice, and everyone's happy, or starves to death. The point is, it's about a grasshopper and an ant.
Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, Catherine Cockburn, Bathsua Makin. You can take a philosophy degree, including Early Modern philosophy, and not come across a single one of these women. The only name likely to ring any bells for an undergraduate philosopher is Elisabeth of Bohemia, and only because of her role in responding to Descartes’ philosophy.
“Can I be honest with you for a minute? Let My son go that he may serve Me, because if you refuse to let him go, indeed I will kill your son, your firstborn.”
Ezekiel 2:8
“But you, son of man, can I just be honest with you for a minute? Do not be rebellious like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you.”
The existence of the authors suggested a way to live and work within institutions that didn’t involve giving up parts of myself, and their books suggested that fear was not an inappropriate response to the world — that there was real violence at play, violence felt not just by me, but by everyone.
