MORRISON: Sure.

MOYERS: You say love is a metaphor, and when I go back through the novels, love is there in so many different ways and forms that — and particularly when I look at the women in your novels, at the extraordinary things they do for love. There’s the grandmother who has her leg amputated so that she can have an insurance policy that will buy a house and take care of her children as they grow up. There’s Sethe, who is willing to kill her children before the slave catchers can come and seize them. What kind of love is that?

MORRISON: Some of it’s very fierce. Powerful. Distorted, even, because the duress they work under is so overwhelming. But I think they believed, as I do, while it may be true that, you know, people say, “I didn’t ask to be born,” I think we did, and that’s why we’re here. We are here, and we have to do something nurturing that we respect before we go. We must. It is more interesting, more complicated, more intellectually demanding and more morally demanding to love somebody, to take care of somebody, to make one other person feel good.

In April 1915, confined to a Berlin women’s prison for her anti-war activities, the socialist firebrand Rosa Luxemburg wrote to a friend and lover that she’d entered one of the flowers he’d sent her into her herbarium. “That was a greater snowdrop — Leucojum vernum,” she informed him; it was distinguishable from the lesser snowdrop, Galanthus nivalis, by the shape and number of leaves. No mere hobby spawned of boredom, botany was an enduring interest of Luxemburg’s, along with geology. The greater snowdrop went into the eleventh of a series of identical notebooks she’d begun years earlier, carefully identifying and labeling hundreds of plant specimens. In prison, she managed to set up a table specifically for the purpose of preserving flowers that arrived in letters or grew on the prison grounds (...) When, in The Russian Revolution, Luxemburg defends the “unobstructed, effervescing life” that flourishes only under conditions of freedom and which can so easily be killed by bureaucracy, it’s hard not to think of the plants and animals she ardently portrays in her letters. When she says that a bird song sounds the same twice only to a “crude and indifferent ear,” or crosses out and corrects her own notes in the herbarium, one sees her insistence on faithful observation of the social and political world as it really is, in all its living detail. And when she describes the way a bird song implies its entire life and habitat — “the whole interests me, not some torn-off detail” — she could just as easily be describing her political position against her shortsighted, reformist contemporaries. (...) Her flower-filled notebooks did not come to light again until 2009, when someone discovered them in a box in the Archive of Modern Records in Warsaw. Looking at the specimens now, I’m struck most by one thing most of all: how much of their color has survived the intervening century. To find the flowers beautiful, as she did, feels like a form of time travel, connecting the unfulfilled promise of her work to the demands of the present. Snowdrops still grow in the fields, and the time is still waiting to be seized. “This day is a gift to you like a rose in full bloom,” Luxemburg wrote to a friend, “lying at your feet, waiting for you to pick it up and press it to your lips.

trying to be and am grateful as i go back to work and face recurrent work demons. i am so happy when im not working, like a different person. a beam of sunshine my sister said. find purpose in joining demonstrations and being with people, not working makes me more helpful and kind to my partner. i have more patience and time for my cats. i could stop the phd now and be done with it. i think i would be happier without it and im not sure if i finished how i would keep working well if i was lucky enough to find a job. id like to teach. but my work turns to ashes in front of me when i turn to it, and i barely can turn to it directly. i love art and humanity and history and life and i feel my senses undeadenjng the more i can find my way back to these. but my work, that is such an expression of these things, feels too hard to do. someone wrote recently that wanting to find out how time regained ended was the reason they decided not to kill themselves. it was comforting to hear that this person i admire a lot had been in such a low moment. im coming back to life and reawakening or awakening for the first time sensually but i can’t square work with this. i sit down and i can’t look at it. today was a wipe out despite spending 7 hours ‘at work’. but i was happy outside of work. but we might have bedbugs which i can’t think about.