is, was

reading Cynthia Ozick makes me not want to die, unless it can be like this

… to postulate an afterlife was her single irony—a game in the head not unlike a melting fudge cube held against the upper palate. There, at any rate, Puttermesser would sit, in Eden, under a middle-sized tree, in the solid blaze of an infinite heart-of-summer July, green, green, green everywhere, green above and green below, herself gleaming and made glorious by sweat, every inch annihilated, fecundity dismissed. And there Puttermesser would, as she imagined it, take in. Ready to her left hand, the box of fudge… ready to her right hand, a borrowed steeple of library books: for into Eden the Crotona Park Branch has ascended intact, sans librarians and fines, but with its delectable terrestrial binding-glue fragrances unevaporated.

Here Puttermesser sits. Day after celestial day, perfection of desire upon perfection of contemplation, into the exaltations of an uninterrupted forever, she eats fudge in human shape… or fudge in square shapes… and she reads. Puttermesser reads and reads. Her eyes in Paradise are unfatigued. And if she still does not know what it is she wants to solve, she has only to read on. The Crotona Park Branch is as paradisal here as it was on earth. She reads anthropology, zoology, physical chemistry, philosophy (in the green air of heaven, Kant and Nietzsche together fall into crystal splinters). The New Books section is peerless: she will learn about the linkages of genes, about quarks, about primate sign language, theories of the origins of the races, religions of ancient civilizations, what Stonehenge meant. Puttermesser will read Non-Fiction into eternity; and there is still time for Fiction!

— Cynthia Ozick, The Puttermesser Papers

Thurber once wrote a story about a bear who leaned so far backward that he ended up by falling on his face. Now we are enduring a feminism so far advanced into “new truths” that it has arrived at last at a set of notions indistinguishable from the most age-encrusted, unenlightened, and imprisoning antifeminist views… Artists who insist on defining themselves as “women” artists may, after a fashion, flourish under that designation, but they should not stumble into the misnomer of calling voluntary circumscription “feminism.” Classical feminism, while not denying the body, while not precluding self-image and self-knowledge, never dreamed of engaging these as single-minded objectives. Feminism means, has always meant, access to possibilities beyond self-consciousness… Self-discovery is only partial discovery.

— Cynthia Ozick, “Literature and the Politics of Sex: A Dissent” (1977)