virtue as vocation – Page 2 – Little Bristling Soul

Adrienne Rich

Read this on the plane the other day and was like, “I need to lay down now.”

“Thirst,” a poem by Garth Greenwell appeared in Salmagundi 144-145 in 2004— 10+ years later and we’re we’re thrilled to see his new novel, What Belongs To You (FSG), celebrated so lavishly and widely (here’s Aaron Hamburger’s Times review)— but we can’t say we’re surprised. Garth’s brilliance as a writer and goodness as a human being has been known to us for a long time. We’re glad the wide world is catching on.

KIKI SMITH, The Vitreous Body, 2000

Marilyn Duker and Roger Slade, Anorexia and Bulimia: How to Help (2nd edn., Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003), 154, emphasis added.

Joan Jacobs Brumberg from Fasting Girls The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease

from Simona Giordano’s Understanding Eating Disorders

…the pursuit of lightness is thus a pursuit of inviolability. Silently, with no apparent intervention on others or on the external environment, people with eating disorders expand that environment, thus expanding the space between themselves and other people. In the isolation of their thinness and lightness, people with eating disorders achieve an exceptional place, one that is out of reach. This achievement, as we shall see in the next chapter, has important links with morality. Isolation in fact allows detachment from the ‘physical’ world, and the achievement of a ‘transcendent’ dimension. Isolation, thus, not only responds to an overwhelming fear of intrusions, but also contributes towards satisfying an ethical ambition to spirituality. Moreover, because of the strenuous sacrifice involved, the defence of the personal sphere is also proof of will power, and this, as we shall see, is one of the keys for understanding the ethical connotations of eating disorders.