nobr

@nobr.me

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gnawing at the bars of my enclosure | break god's bones and suck out the marrow

In the essay on Hawthorne's Mosses, Melville wrote: "I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul."
The Concoction
a black and white dog pulling against their leash and looking very silly
Text reading: "But an evangelical upbringing has even less to do with excellent stationery; when I was a child, our church had a food court that served chicken fingers. I liked them at the time, of course, but nevertheless I could not shake a secret conviction that my tastes were not being properly cultivated, as they ought to have been. From an early age I longed to be pretentious. I had a vague but definite suspicion that there were finer things out there in the world, but I didn’t know what they were, so I could not alienate my fellow second-graders by claiming to prefer them. I knew, of course, that my sole Catholic friend had pierced ears – had, in fact, had her ears pierced since she was an infant, was seemingly brought into the world already accessorized, and that this precocious stylishness was somehow linked with her Catholicism. As an eight-year-old I felt about pierced ears the way Oscar Wilde or Anaïs Nin felt about love; I wanted it to happen to me, I wanted it to hurt, and I wanted it to be beautiful."