When we, in our so pregnant expression, make love with someone of our own species, we also make love with the horse and the dolphin, the kitten and the macaw, the powdery moths and the lustful crickets.

A thinker who comprehends with the hands, hands made for blessing, sees swallows and owls, wetlands and tundra pullulate with grace.  Blessing is the beginning and the end of all ecological awareness.  [...] Laughter and tears, blessing and cursing break through the packaging and labeling of things that make our environment something only scanned and skimmed over.  They are forces with which we impact on nature, which we had perused only as the text of the world.  They are forces that seek out and engage reality.

Lust in not content with respectful and considerate caresses and release of tension; it wants another, wilder orgasm, it wants orgasms on jet airplanes and in tropical swamps, it wants bondage and whips.

Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions (University of California Press, 2000), pp. 37, 71, 78, 79.

…and more to come…

“Then Again, the autobiography of the amazing Diane Keaton.  Recently I read an excerpt in Vogue, in which Keaton talks about her childhood, her first steps into acting, and that fateful meeting with Woody Allen:   “I was in love with him before I knew him. […] it was his manner that got me, his way of gesturing, his hands, his coughing and looking down in a self-deprecating way [...].” Her sense of humor, her style, and her cool collected-ness are the reason she’s my top “person to have coffee with.” So this Christmas, I’ll be doing just that. Alternating that with some Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone issues, of course.” – Radina Papukchieva

“At the recommendation of one of my professors, I’m kicking off the holiday break with some philosophical reading. Dangerous Emotions is an existential text by American phenomenologist and world traveler Alphonso Lingis. Originally published in 2000, it comprises Lingis’ personal reflections on the many places he has lived in, including Easter Island, Japan, Java and Brazil. Celebrated for his dauntless style of questioning, Lingis guides the reader through an examination of human anxiety and our relationship to violence, crime and death. In so doing, he carves out a space for exhilaration to emerge from a breakdown of human reason, challenging cultural theorists and philosophers to reconsider their assumptions about the dark side of emotion.” – Sophia Trozzo