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Quote by Alan Kaufman

“And when he refused to tell her he loved her after sex, she broke all the dishes until her arms bled and the medics took her away. And he sat and blew Arabesques of smoke.”

Quote by Alan Kaufman

Book:Matches: A Novel
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Matches: A Novel

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Alan Kaufman

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“Dad didn't hate weddings," Mae said. Her mom's brow creased. "Yes, he did," she said with a chuckle. "He was always going on about how he could go the rest of his life without hearing the wedding march ever again." "No, he didn't," Mae said more firmly. She set her fork down. "He hated going to your family's weddings. Because it meant being around a bunch of white people who were just subtle enough to keep their racism discreet." That did it. Susan froze. John took a long drink from his wineglass. Connor's gaze steadied on Mae, a haze of uncertainty in his eyes. Madison jerked her head back. Sierra watched her, looking vaguely curious. Her mom stared, mouth open. "It was inevitable," Mae continued. "Whenever we had to be around the Parkers. Someone would always say something borderline. Dad and I would exchange a look, like, Here we go. Every wedding, every Christmas, every Thanksgiving, every Easter, we would sit across from each other at a table full of white people and share our silent little looks." Her face was burning. Every pair of eyes at the table was laser-focused on her. Even Jayla, sitting one table over with the wedding party, was staring. Mae's mom opened her mouth, which just reminded Mae she had more to say. "I wish you'd told me about grandma being racist to Althea." It was mortifying, spilling her guts in front of her in-laws, but it was freeing, too. Like she was invincible. Like even though she was about to wreck her entire life, at least no one could stop her. You couldn't stop a hurricane. "You said you didn't want me to feel different around her, but, Mom, I already did. And I wish you'd told me I had a sister. Do you know how much less alone I would have felt, knowing Sierra was my sister? Being around family that looked like me? Instead of a grandpa who said the n-word in front of me when I was eight? Or my husband's mom asking me how dark my skin gets in the sun?" Susan paled. "Or a cousin who--- you know what, Madison," Mae said, catching her eye across the table, "it is racist to say you refuse to shop at Black-owned businesses, and I shouldn't have defended you when Sierra called you on it." Madison's cheeks reddened, and she looked like she was going to object, but Mae wasn't done. "Is it any wonder that I would drive to Hobson and sacrifice so much to stay there, burning through all my PTO, giving up my entire honeymoon, because I finally had a family that didn't make me feel out of place?”

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“Dependency does not reduce value but rather grants dignity, a notion fundamentally counter to those for whom the freedom of birds is insulting. God’s glory does not diminish ours, and our dignity is not a threat to God, for God’s own glory, in part, is us. The glory of God is present to things as the graciousness of their being; things are never just themselves, they carry the weight of God along with them.”

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“While laziness is indeed one manifestation of sloth, the problem actually runs deeper. According to [Rebecca Konyndyk] DeYoung, sloth "is resistance to the discipline and transformation demanded by our new identity as God's beloved children." Sloth, she counterintuitive argues, is as much a problem for the world's busy people as it is its loafers. The reason is that sloth is actually opposed not to diligence per se but to fervently seeking to fulfill our duties. On DeYoung's telling, the "restless busyness" of our lives is often a form of escapism from the tasks that really require our attention, above all loving God and our neighbors.”

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“Addiction occurs through choices, but somehow it also happens behind our backs. No one consciously sets out to devote themselves to the machine, to become its addict. Its veto power over all other possible attentions takes place, cumulatively, through every apparently free choice made as a user. We drop into the dead zone, the ‘ticker trance’ of feed addiction, by increment. The way the chronophagic machine fights for our attention recalls what Eastern Christianity used to call the demon of acedia. This was a predecessor of the modern concept of melancholia, and it was used in monasteries (those ancient writing machines) to describe an affliction of the devoted. In the original Greek, ‘akedia’ meant ‘lack of care’. In the Latinized Christian use propagated by Evagrius of Pontus, it described a lack of care about one’s life; a listless, restless spiritual lethargy. The condition left one yearning for distraction and continual novelty, exploiting one’s petty hates and hungers. It dissolved one’s capacity for attending, for living as if living mattered, into a series of itches demanding to be scratched. Ultimately, it was dehumanizing, corrosive of meaning: it was spiritual death.”

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“There is a useful sorrow, and a destructive sorrow. Sorrow is useful when we weep for our sins, and for our neighbour’s ignorance, and so that we may not relax our purpose to attain to true goodness, these are the real kinds of sorrow. Our enemy adds something to this. For he sends sorrow without reason, which is something called lethargy. We ought always to drive out a sadness like that with prayers and psalms.”

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“Kate Gompert’s always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy—happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love—are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.”

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