43
" What marriage offers - and what fidelity is meant to protect - is the possibility of moments when what we have chosen and what we desire are the same. Such a convergence obviously cannot be continuous. No relationship can continue very long at its highest emotional pitch. But fidelity prepares us for the return of these moments, which give us the highest joy we can know; that of union, communion, atonement (in the root sense of at-one-ment)...To forsake all others does not mean - because it cannot mean - to ignore or neglect all others, to hide or be hidden from all others, or to desire or love no others. To live in marriage is a responsible way to live in sexuality, as to live in a household is a responsible way to live in the world. One cannot enact or fulfill one's love for womankind or mankind, or even for all the women or men to whom one is attracted. If one is to have the power and delight of one's sexuality, then the generality of instinct must be resolved in a responsible relationship to a particular person. Similarly, one cannot live in the world; that is, one cannot become, in the easy, generalizing sense with which the phrase is commonly used, a " world citizen." There can be no such think as a " global village." No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one's partiality.(pg.117-118, " The Body and the Earth" ) "
51
" In 1963, when I assigned the name " quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been " kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word " quark" in the phrase " Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since " quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with " Mark," as well as " bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as " kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the " portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry " Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be " Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation " kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature. "
54
" You are aware that what they do, they do for the world, and the results are, of course, magnificent. But when you . . . read Douglas Adams. . . you feel you are, perhaps, the only person in the world who really gets them. Just about everybody else admires them, of course, but no one really connects with them in the way you do . . . It’s like falling in love. When an especially peachy Adams’ turn of phrase or epithet enters the eye and penetrates the brain, you want to tap the shoulder of the nearest stranger and share it. The stranger might laugh and seem to enjoy the writing, but you hug to yourself the thought that they didn’t quite understand its force and quality the way you do, just as your friends, thank heavens, don’t also fall in love with the person you are going on and on about to them. "
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