Young Girls Are Sad. They Like To

Books That Change You, Even Later In Life, Give You A Kind Of Electrical Shock As The World Takes A Different Shape.

A Beautiful Woman, Simone Weil Said, Seeing Herself In The Mirror, Knows "this Is I." An Ugly Woman Knows With Equal Certainty, "this Is Not I." Maud Knew This Neat Division Represented An Over-simplification. The Doll-mask She Saw Had Nothing To Do With Her, Nothing.

He Was Beautiful, That Was Always Affirmed, But His Beauty Was Hard To Fix Or To See, For He Was Always Glimmering, Flickering, Melting, Mixing, He Was The Shape Of A Shapeless Flame, He Was The Eddying Thread Of Needle-shapes In The Shapeless Mass Of The Waterfall. He Was The Invisible Wind That Hurried The Clouds In Billows And Ribbons. You Could See A Bare Tree On The Skyline Bent By The Wind, Holding Up Twisted Branches And Bent Twigs, And Suddenly Its Formless Form Would Resolve Itself Into That Of The Trickster.

As A Little Girl, I Didn't Like Stories About Little Girls. I Liked Stories About Dragons And Beasts And Princes And Princesses And Fear And Terror And The Four Musketeers And Almost Anything Other Than Nice Little Girls Making Moral Decisions About Whether To Tell The Teacher About What The Other Little Girl Did Or Did Not Do.

Harm Can Come About Without Will Or Action. But Will And Action Can Avert Harm.