… joyless and joyful moments in bright rooms overflowing with believers, in two prison cells, in one red Cadillac. 

…the husband who longs to transform the moon into a pool of water so his waitress-wife can soak her feet…

But does he who diagnosed a repressed society in the early 1900s have anything to say to us, we who live by expressing?  

As a student in UC Berkeley, he avoids “hobby lobby classes.”

…we may better see how Malcolm X, another disciple of the Nation of Islam, found a method for his many reinventions.

Talents indispensable to historians are somewhat mysterious.

In the final reckoning, whatever his purpose or motives, he stubbornly chose his course.

One incredible gift was his ability to hold multiple notions of time simultaneously.

We push against descent into childhood.

This tension between flatness and non-flatness reveals an underlying discomfort with progress as humans go about transforming a living breathing Earth. 

That this unmistakable woman-in-a-bandanna image is from the kitchen, and for the kitchen should not come as a surprise.

…this knowledge system’s ponderous weight quieted doubts about the morality of conquest.

Egoistic humans leaning to self-development can inspire and problem-solve and whatever else.

Moralistic fervor finds safe targets.

Struggle we understand of course also in non-Darwinian terms.

…we could not know perversions or exaggerations.

…the earth became less mother and more planet and geography.

Her fierce boldness makes for joyous reading.

Disciplined study was shunned and raised eyebrows.

If it wrecked the women’s lives, we don’t learn about it.