Many women are surprised by the intensity of their maternal pull and the conflict it brings to their competing roles. This is the ...precise point at which many women feel the stress of the work/family dilemma most keenly. They realize that they may have a price to pay for wanting to be both professionals and mothers. They feel guilty for not being at work, and angry for being manipulated into feeling this guilt. . . . They don't quite fit at home. They don't quite fit at work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while t...here is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a l...eg or a finger, they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischief of their vices, but not from their vices.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is ... useful to distinguish between the pornographic, condemned in every society, and the bawdy, the ribald, the shared vulgar...ities and jokes, which are the safety valves of most social systems. Pornography is a most doubtful safety valve. In extreme cases it may feed the perverted imagination of the doomed man who starts by pulling a little girl's braid and ends by cutting off a little girl's head, as each increasing stimulus loses its effectiveness and must be replaced by a more extreme one. This is particularly true of the pornography primarily designed to be brooded over in secret. But is quite otherwise with the music hall jokes, the folk ribaldry at a wedding, the innocent smut of the smoking rooms, where men who are perennially faithful to their wives exchange stories which release explosive laughter. Pornography does not lead to laughter, it leads to deadly serious pursuit of sexual satisfaction divorced from personality and from every other meaning. The uproarious laugh of the group who recognize a common dilemma--the laughter of a group of women at the story of the intractable unborn who refused to budge and merely shivered under the effects of the quart of ice cream hopefully eaten by its poor mother, the laughter of a group of men at the story of the bride who asked to be "frightened" a fourth time--is the laughter of human beings who are making the best of the imperfect social arrangements within which their life here on earth is conducted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The duty of caring for failing elderly relatives is more than a family matter, a personal dilemma, or a sex equity issue. Basicall...y, it is a problem of how our society views old and disabled people. With the growing numbers of chronically ill, it can no longer be some other family's tragedy. Eventually we must face hard questions, as individuals and as a nation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the l...east teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the deeper layers of the modern consciousness ... every attempt to succeed is an act of aggression, leaving one alone and guilt...y and defenseless among enemies: one is punished for success. This is our intolerable dilemma: that failure is a kind of death and success is evil and dangerous, is--ultimately--impossible.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »