tenderness always

We are always reading for the first time. For instance, you have been occupying half my mind today, so when I read a part of me is oriented towards you and a part of me is oriented towards the text at hand. This “colors” the text, shades my reading of it so that at the word love (or surprise or wonder) you spring to my mind. My reading is interrupted. I am distracted.

“I would like to write a book about war that would make war sickening, and the very thought of it repulsive. Insane. So that even the generals would be sickened … My men friends (as opposed to women) are taken aback by such ‘women’s logic’. And again I hear the ‘men’s’ argument: ‘You weren’t in the war.’ But maybe that’s a good thing: I don’t know the passion of hatred; my vision is normal. Unwarlike, unmanly.”