Eurudice

Ela thinks love is a form of gangrene that settles in silently, moves fast like a bacillus loose in the blood and takes over one's entire body, causing excruciating agony or insanity. A while later the pain stops, and soon after death comes. An unmistakable putrid smell signals love's nasty presence.

...

Love blinds people to their blemishes and violences, and to the inadequacy of the world. It chains them to their fantasies of others. It breeds sacrifice, stagnation, suffering, humiliation, Ela has observed.

...

Love is perishable: every love plays out and in times becomes meaningless. Why must I watch the reruns? Ela wonders.

(Eurudice, "F/32", pp. 25, 29, 30)

Winokur

cell yell
Loud talking on cell phones in public places by people with the apparent neurotic need to invade their own privacy.

guilt
Traditionally, remorse over having done something wrong; self-reproach for some moral failure. Now, a chronic, free-floating, unarticulated malaise, a festering sense of existential worthlessness. And then you feel guilty for feeling guilty.

(Jon Winokur, from "Encyclopedia Neurotica," excerpted in Utne, April 2005)

McKibben

And here is how I'd like to pose it. We speak often, and sentimentally, of being "enchanted" by the natural world. But what if it's the other way around? What if we are enchanted, literally, by the human world we live in? That seems entirely more likely - that the consumer world amounts to a kind of lulling spell, chanted tunefully and eternally by the TV, the billboard, the suburb. A spell that convinces us that the things we want most from the world are comfort, convenience, security. A spell that by now we sing to each other. A spell that, should it start to weaken, we try to strengthen with medication, with consumption, with noise. A slightly frantic enchantment, one that has to get louder all the time to block out the troubling question constantly forming in the back of our minds: "Is this all there is?" (Bill McKibben, "A Shirt Full of Bees: How getting stung woke one man up to the sensuous world," in Utne, April 2005)

Marcus

SADNESS The first powder to be abided upon waking. It may reside in tools or garments and can be eradicated with more of itself, in which case the face results as a placid system coursing with water, heaving. (Ben Marcus, "The Age of Wire and String", p. 13)

RARE WATERS, THE Sereies of liquids containing samples of the first water. It is the only water not yet killed. It rims the eyes, falls from them during certain times, and collects at the feet, averting the grasp of hands, which are dry, and need it. (Ben Marcus, "The Age of Wire and String", p. 26)

MOTHER, THE The softest location in the house. It smells of foods that are fine and sweet. Often it moves through rooms on its own, cooing the name of the person. When it is tired, it sits, and members vie for position in its arms. (Ben Marcus, "The Age of Wire and String", p. 64)

MICHAEL% 1. Amount or degree to which any man is Michael Marcus, the father. 2. Name given to any man whom one wishes were the father. 3. The act or technique of converting all names or structures to Michael. 4. Any system of patriarchal rendering. (Ben Marcus, "The Age of Wire and String", p. 122)

WIRE, THE The only element that is attached, affixed, or otherwise in contact with every other element, object, item, person, or member of the society. It is gray and often golden and glimmers in the morning. Members polish it simply by moving forward or backward or resting in place. The wire is the shorest distance between two bodies. It may be followed to any area or person one desires. It contains on its surface the shredded residue of hands - from members that pulled too hard, held on too long, got there too fast. (Ben Marcus, "The Age of Wire and String", p. 140)

Rogers

One of the most satisfying experiences I know - is just fully to appreciate an individual in the same way that I appreciate a sunset. When I look at a sunset...I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a little on the right hand corner, and put a bit more purple along the base, and use a little more pink in the cloud color...." I don't try to control a sunset. I watch it with awe as it unfolds. (Carl Rogers, quoted in "Counseling Children," 6th ed., by Charles L. Thompson, Linda B. Rudolph, and Donna Henderson, p. 160)

Olsen

What if the critics are right, Kysha wonders beside you, her tone easing into something you have never heard from her before, something suddenly taut and authentic, and the self-esteem movement is not only goofy but hazardous?

How so? you ask, watching the plane gaining speed.

What if inflated self-esteem - the kind that comes not from actual achievement but from teachers and parents drumming into kids how great they are - triggers narcissism instead of self-worth?

What if the result of the self-esteem movement isn't a child who applauds him or herself healthfully, but one who stews with hostility and aggression against the world for lying to him or her repeatedly?

(Lance Olsen, "Girl Imagined by Chance," p. 153)