Eula Biss from Pain Scale
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I’m filled with a strange unspecific desire. I want everything and nothing.
In the furniture stores we visit, I’m filled with a strange unspecific desire. I want everything and nothing. The soft colors of the rugs, the warm wood grains, the brass and glass of the lamps all seem to suggest that the stores are filled with beautiful things, but when I look at any one thing I don’t find it beautiful. “The desire to consume is a kind of lust,” Lewis Hyde writes. “But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire.”
— Eula Biss, Having and Being Had (Riverhead Books, September 1, 2020)
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The Pain Scale, Eula Biss//Otto Hightower and Alicent Hightower in House of the Dragon (2022)
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“The problem of pain is that I cannot feel my father's, and he cannot feel mine. This, I suppose, is also the essential mercy of pain.”
The Pain Scale by Eula Biss
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Having and Being Had
Eula Biss
After years of struggle as a working writer, which included living in Iowa City with curbside furniture, Eula Biss feels pride and relief securing a solid place in the middle class with the purchase of a house in Evanston and prestigious job as a writing professor at Northwestern. She becomes a mother as she enters her middle age. However, her new societal position is uncomfortable for her and the values she is living are problematic. She began a diary, examining her experience in relation to money, gender, class and race. This catalog of observations addresses this moment, and, as with all of her work, is an inspiration for living the examined life.
-Mary
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"The problem of pain is that I cannot feel my father's, and he cannot feel mine. This, I suppose, is also the essential mercy of pain."
Eula Biss, The Pain Scale
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The extent to which it is hard to imagine an ethos powerful enough to compete with capitalism, even if that ethos is based on the inherent value of human lives, is suggestive of how successfully capitalism has limited our imaginations.
Eula Biss
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“If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity.”
— Eula Biss, On Immunity (p. 19)
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and when the essential mercy of pain is that i cannot feel my father's, and he cannot feel mine
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finally bought a bicycle and took it for a test ride. depressive episode cured
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“Do all your work as if you had a thousand years to live,” Mother Ann Lee told her brethren, “and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.”
— Eula Biss, Having and Being Had (Riverhead Books, September 1, 2020)
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