Comfort within Book Ends
For this month’s Substack, I am sharing some powerful words I read with my book club.
Reading with a small circle of friends has been transformative. We read to grow the mind and expand the heart. In time, we have shared wounds, lessons, and joy.
Below are a few quotes from my readings this year.
1. This collection of prose-poems is certain to soften your heart.
“who decides? who decides when the punishment is over, when justice is served? who decides who is worthy of the power to punish, to take life in their hands? i want to ask this same question of the cops. the courts. the people who made prisons. i want to ask where the right to violence comes from, who grants it, who makes the distinction between violence for justice and violence for domination.”
2. This work examines the pan-gender damage of the patriarchy.
“Learning to wear a mask (that word already embedded in the term “masculinity”) is the first lesson in patriarchal masculinity that a boy learns. He learns that his core feelings cannot be expressed if they do not conform to the acceptable behaviors sexism defines as male. Asked to give up the true self in order to realize the patriarchal ideal, boys learn self-betrayal early and are rewarded for these acts of soul murder.”
3. An examination of our collective myths and how it hurts us to navigate them on autopilot.
“We are taught both to minimize the harm we experience and to deny and defend ourselves when anyone tells us we hurt them. As a result, most of us are unskilled at giving and receiving feedback, which limits our self-awareness and damages our relationships.”
4. From the most powerful 100 pages I’ve ever read.
“There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior. And this human truth has an especially grinding force here, where identity is almost impossible to achieve and people are perpetually attempting to find their feet on the shifting sands of status.’“
My love for James Baldwin inspired me to create a book club. His work, The Fire Next Time, is like a religious text. This should be required reading in high school. I’ve written Baldwin on MLK Day and believe that anyone willing to engage with his ideas will find that together, we can change the world.
Have you read anything that meets the moment? If so, please feel free to share here!
