1
" If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning.They're right. It does.However much you beg it to stop.It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember.It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life...All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom.Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor.Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks.And then the world turns...And somebody falls off...And oh God it's such a long way down.Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller...Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible.We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth.Trying to measure how far we have to fall.No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives...Wrapping ourselves in comforting banalities to keep us warm against the cold." Time's a great healer." " At least it was quick." " The world keeps turning." Oh Alec—Alec's dead. "
2
" I loved the zebras, the cheetahs, the fruit flies, the octopi and the rest. But The Nature of Sex “climaxed” with a species I’d never heard of before, “bonobos,” which the narrator also called by their Latin/scientific name Pan paniscus. I knew “Pan” as classical Greek mythology’s horned and horny god of the wild, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. But when the bonobos started swinging onto my screen, well… what can I say? Today, I’ve got a whole book’s worth of stuff to say, but back then, I couldn’t utter a word. Imagine looking into an evolutionary funhouse mirror and seeing a side of yourself you’ve never seen before, shocking yet deeply familiar.
“Who are these vibrant, joyful creatures that look so much like me, only hairier?” I wondered. “And what’s with all the sex?” They weren’t just going at it for procreation. They were engaging in sex for recreation and interpersonal communication, very much like humans, but without the pretense, hypocrisy and shame. I got very excited, but no, I still didn’t want to have sex with them. I wanted to have sex like them (at least occasionally), in that playful yet deeply meaningful way of theirs I started calling the Bonobo Way.
But would it keep our sex life out of the dreaded sinkhole? Only time would tell. "
― Susan Block , The Bonobo Way
