Robert K. Merton's ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS: A SHANDEAN POSTSCRIPT

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton in a letter to Robert Hooke, 1675.

Memes are older than the Internet. We just used to call them "aphorisms" or "quotations" or "folk wisdom". And back before we called them "memes" they were pretty hard to trace to sources. Pretty hard but also, as mid-century intellectual delight Robert K. Merton has proven in his utterly wonderful On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, a whole lot of fun! 

Anyone who's spent more than ten minutes reading this blog knows that my favorite novel, probably ever, is Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which I'll be reading again later this summer as not one but two of the Discord Servers I hang out on are brewing up giant buddy reads of this book. 

I'm going to encourage all of them to try to track down a copy of On the Shoulders of Giants (or OTSOG, as Merton himself has charmingly dubbed it and elucidates late in this work as a versatile new word which by all rights should have entered our vernacular but has largely been replaced by the less amusing but also less opaque "humblebrag") as either a companion read or a chaser. It's just the perfect example of what I've always imagined as the ideal way to live a life, as Casaubon attempted to do in Eco's novel:* be the "Sam Spade of Culture "

The mystery here being, while most modern people think it was Isaac Newton who first said "If I have seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants,"** intellectuals know he was condensing and paraphrasing a much earlier thought. A meme. But where did he get it? And where did that person get it? And the person he (or she, or [singular] they, but let's be honest, probably he, at least in that for most of recorded history only men got to record their thoughts in any durable way. So probably he, though who knows if he got it from his wife or sister or mom?) who passed it on from distant antiquity? But how distant? 

Helpfully, once Merton has spent many pages (in the form of a letter to Bernard Bailyn, whom I chiefly know as a the author of The Idealogical Origins of the American Revolution***, a book beloved of libertarians, both with and without the capital L) teasing out the history and provenance of the phrase all the way back to the 12th century and perhaps to even earlier, he presents us with a helpful table suitable for copying out and hanging on the wall to remind us all that no idea is truly original, that immature artists borrow from the mature artists who originally stole them from Oscar Wilde, etc.

But so, OTSOG would really seem to have no business being as entertaining as it is, but the fact remains: this is the most fun I have had with a piece of non-fiction in years. This is because Merton, while a serious scholar, indeed the "father of modern sociology" (who has a lot of fun in one of this book's many digressions considering this matter of intellectual fatherhood of things like anatomy and physiology and many other arts and sciences) is also a very funny and playful writer, at least in this work, which, after all, takes its subtitle from the novel that was post-modern before there was any modern of which to be post-, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It is a very Shandean work with its wide-ranging and curious approach to its subject, its willingness to stray off its mapped-out path (but always to find its way back. Eventually) and its overall tone, which, get ready for that.

Consider this, a meditation on the word "stand" into which Merton enters after spending some time comparing versions of the aphorism, in English and other languages, some of which are ambiguous about the position of the dwarfs in relationship to their giants -- standing versus sitting:

The OED**** requires 38 columns of tight-packed print to set out 104 meanings of the word and its various formations. After studying a few dozen of these meanings, one suffers and an attack of paranomasia. One doesn't know whether one is standing on one's head or on one's feet. In such cases, one must suppose, the only sound position is a stand-pat policy if one is to stand committed to truth and be prepared to stand the consequences. This may stand one a high price, but as things stand, to stand firm may stand one in good stead and may indeed be the only way to stand off abominable ambiguities. One must simply stand one's ground if one stands for something rather than nothing. If, I say, one stands for standards, if one is more than a stand-in for a scholar, if one wishes to preserve one's scholarly standing and to stand on good terms with one's peers, then one must take a strong stand. In the end each of us stands under the heavy obligation to stand guard and to stand to our guns in the face of the standing threat to single-sensed clarity. To stand upon ceremony in these matters or to stand much upon one's dignity would only mean that we have little else to stand upon. United we stand, provided that we do not stand upon our differences but stand together, side by side, rather than stand apart, aside or astrut. We must stand by not, not back, if we are to stand off the standing threat or at least bring it to a standstill. Only so, do we even stand a chance; only so, can we achieve a common understanding. This is no mean venture and the question is: can you stand it?"

This is merely my favorite example of the kind of writing to be enjoyed in OTSOG. There are so many others, so many fascinating nuggets of information and of speculation about the information he has found. When I first started reading OTSOG I was ashamed to realize that I had owned my personal copy for over 20 years; as I read, though, I found that only now, and maybe not even only now, had I the personal resources to appreciate its many pleasures: I already knew the names of most of the scholars Merton discusses, from my own academic studies and also from my repeated readings of things like Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, a trilogy of novels teeming with historical figures, including Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Samuel Pepys, who figure so deeply in the middle sections of the delicious gossip on offer in OTSOG.

It even gave me a clue or two as to where some of my other favorite works of fiction may have gotten some of their ideas, including, of all things, that of Tim Powers! A detail from his The Stress of Her Regard was very likely taken from a source mentioned in OTSOG, which Merton discusses when quoting from Tristram Shandy as the hero's father, still awaiting Tristram's birth, is trying to clear up a footnote:

Should you think this is just another invention of Stern's parturient imagination, you would be badly mistaken. There actually was an ignorant physician and man-midwife, William Smellie, who did indeed... mistake the caption of the drawing of a petrified child just taken from its mother's womb as the name of an author.

How could I not think of the detail in The Stress of Her Regard about a baffling section of a medical text being mistaken for the removal of a petrified infant when it was "really" (in Powers' delightfully magic- and monster-riddled version of the early 19th century) instructions on how to implant a tiny statue into a human body, to create a link between Powers' stony monster race and humans, to allow to monsters free reign in our world?

I have no idea how easily a copy of OTSOG may be to find these days; my own I got at an out of the way used bookstore in the middle of Wyoming at the tail end of the 20th century. It was exactly the sort of weird medicine I needed right now as we begin a summer full of stupid foreboding and anti-intellectualism at levels not even the most hidebound clerical authorities of the "dark ages" seem to have striven for. I needed its reminder that it is fun to be smart, that knowing things can be a source of enjoyment second only to finding things out. Your own joke about dwarfs and giants and seeing far here.

*Eco, you may note if you can read the crummy scan of the cover art that I had to use here, wrote an introduction to the edition that I own and it is every bit as charming and witty as we might expect from the god who created Causaubon, Diotallevi and Jacopo Belbo.

**In a letter to fellow Baroque Cycle character Robert Hooke. I'm not going to pretend to be the intellect that Merton is; I first learned about Robert Hooke (and Samuel Pepys and many others besides) from Neal Stephenson.

***Who, based on copyright dates for the original editions of these two books, might well have been working on that very book while Merton was writing him this "letter." So yes, I might be reading that again soon...

****The Oxford English Dictionary, the latest edition of which runs to 20 volumes in print; it has since ceased to be published in print due to its mass, which is now measured in megabytes. Over 500 of them. 

Tloto Tsamaase's WOMB CITY

The reader is a full quarter of the way through Womb City before anything, in this case a chapter heading, actually mentions misogyny, but make no mistake. Womb City is a novel more deeply concerned with misogyny and misogynoir than anything else I've read and bitches, don't even mention The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's feminist nightmare dystopia persecutes its female characters with 19th century technology at best. Womb City incorporates the cyberpunk tech of Richard K. Morgan's Takashi Kovacs novels into its workings to create a surveillance state like no other, and sends us exploring it through the eyes of one of its most deeply fucked-over victims for a few eventful months in her privileged but precarious life and it goes HARD.

Nelah Bogosi-Ntsu might seem, at first glance, to have it all: part of the "body hopping" upper crust of a high tech future Botswana in which consciousness is stored on silicon and can be swapped among bodies to escape disease, experience life in a body of another sex, immigrate to another country, or just enjoy exceptional longevity, but this luxury comes at a whole terrifying range of high costs. Bodies are both disposable and precious in Nelah's world, and the technology's incorporation into the criminal justice system alone is utterly terrifying: you can be forcibly extracted from your body as punishment for even little misdemeanors. If that happens, your consciousness gets stored in a mind prison where, in most cases, it will be continuously tortured until its time is served and a body becomes available again; meanwhile, your new body has been microchipped with a dizzying array of surveillance technology so that everything the new occupant does, says, or has the barest potential to do or say in the next year, can be replayed like a movie for a supervisory board of forensic specialists to whom records are submitted for judgement.

Nelah is a 430-year old in a 29-year-old criminal's body, but since part of the embodiment process that put them there erases one's memory, and because records of a body's prior occupants' deeds are essentially sealed, Nelah has no idea why one arm is a fancy prosthetic and other parts are weirdly scarred -- or why the body's rich and important original family, with whom they're sort of expected to re-integrate by social custom, is so much weirder around them than they've been led to expect.

This all sounds like spoilers, but I'm merely describing the milieu in which the novel's intricate potboiler of a plot takes place -- Tsamaase owes a lot more to the aforementioned Richard K. Morgan and a host of other sci-fi thriller writers than she does to Margaret Atwood.

Also unlike Atwood, Tsamaase is deeply, deeply intersectional, and this novel is more concerned with class and privilege and how the ultimate surveillance state -- I mean, move over, Big Brother -- affects every life; when our hero and her motley and complicated web of connections transform from a comfortable but confined citizens to rebels, they're acting not merely on behalf of women of reproductive age but everybody. And there's more.

The Botswana of Womb City is inextricable from the Botswana of the distant past, its cultural heritage and especially its particular mythology, its creation fables, its spiritual life, its haunting shared memory -- all things about which I have been ignorant. Reading Womb City has been a hell of a way to learn about it!

Stephen Graham Jones' MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW

 If we go fast enough, if we close our eyes tight enough, if we ball our fists tight enough and lean forward far enough, then we can still remember what it's like to not just be terrified, but to be so terrified that we start grinning, and finally laughing, and then whether we get away or not doesn't matter anymore, because whatever's after us can never touch our smile.

Is it weird to open a directionless essayish thing about a new novel by quoting from its afterword? It feels weird. But this paragraph from the afterword of Stephen Graham Jones' latest, My Heart is a Chainsaw, struck me as such a perfect encapsulation of our culture's love for horror stories and their cathartic power that I had to include it here.

I am not the target audience for My Heart is a Chainsaw. I'm not a huge slasher movie fan. I'll sit down and watch one every now and then, but just as its parent genre of horror isn't my favorite, the slasher subgenre is something of which I am certainly aware, and have hilarious memories of watching at slumber parties in the 1980s, but for me, slashers are more a thing for which I appreciate the appreciation of others rather than really seek out on those rare occasions these days when I can bring myself to sit down in front of a movie or TV screen.*

So, if Jennifer "Jade" Davis, the teenaged heroine of My Heart is a Chainsaw, were to meet me, she would probably get frustrated with me in minutes, but if she gave me a chance she would find me a more attentive audience than, say, her history teacher, Mr. Holmes, for her lectures on the subgenre. These are delightful, peppered with encyclopedic knowledge, a head for real world applications of the lessons learned, and her smarter-than-smartass delivery of these insights. Seriously, if you think you don't have time to read the whole book** you owe it to yourself to get your hands on a copy for an hour or two to just enjoy the "Slasher 101" essays Jade has submitted throughout her checkered high school career as extra credit work for Mr. Holmes. They appear between each chapter of the narrative proper, and are the sassiest things you'll read this season, if not this year, and could be packaged and marketed as a chapbook all their own to great success.

Jade has grown up in a tiny Idaho town with a colorful history all its own even before it gets discovered by a small consortium of millionaires-or-billionaires. Founded in the years leading up to Idaho's statehood (just a week before my bordering home state of Wyoming's in 1890) and relocated once after a dam was built to create a reservoir that was unofficially christened Indian Lake, Proofrock has legends of a dead preacher in the original drowned town, a drowned "lake witch" whose origin story still inhabits living memory, and a traditional July 4 party in which a giant inflatable movie screen is placed on the town's beach, the better to be viewed from rafts, inner tubes, paddle boats and anything else that floats, for a community-wide screening of, of course, Jaws.*** How could Jade, a semi-outcast unwanted by either parent and working as a janitor for a variety of county and municipal buildings (including her high school) to save up to get the hell out of town after she graduates, not grow up a horror fan?

It also, as of the area's discovery by the new rich settlers who call themselves "Founders" in true colonial bullshit fashion, the site of an exclusive new housing development on the other side of Indian Lake called Terra Nova, from which cigarette boats and yachts are deployed to bring the settlement's children to school in Proofrock and the grown-ups to patronize the tiny local business district when the fancy strikes them. It's not enough for them to buy up the best views and privacy and build themselves a special little enclave; they want to be loved for it, too, so they know they've got to spread cash around to buy the resentful locals' adoration.****

Among the newcomers is one Letha Mondragon, a paragon of 21st century femininity (self-rescuing princess edition) whom Jade immediately pegs as born to be a Final Girl almost before Jade realizes that they might just actually be living a slasher movie plot in real life. Only Letha is so very modern and so very much a paragon that she misinterprets Jade's attempts to prepare her for her coming role as cries for help from a sociologically challenged and domestically desperate peer and believes that it is Jade who needs her help, rather than that she needs Jade's. The relationship that develops between them is complex and fascinating even as circumstances ramp up and the situation becomes one in which there is very much not time for a complicated and fascinating relationship to develop as all around them Plot. Happens. Oh so very much Plot Happens. Plot Happens in ways that feel as inevitable as a formula slasher film but also, highlighting Stephen Graham Jones' incredible skill as a novelist, would bear at least two different and contradictory interpretations right up until the final chapter (which is, delightfully, called The Final Chapter, because all of the chapters are, I believe, named after classics of the slasher genre).

And I'm not going to say anything more about it because you're going to go get it and read it now, aren't you? And then come back here and talk to me about how ending a story with a scene straight out of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom made me legit ugly cry.

*Which is very, very rare these days. I did go to a theater to see the Denis Villeneuve Dune because of course I did, but almost didn't make it home afterwards because of the migraine the theater's way OTT sound system induced. As for TV, I'll watch the new Great British Baking Show every week purely as a sort of Friday night palliative, and I'm sort of half-assedly watching the World Series aka "what if both teams were villains" but otherwise these days, I don't have the patience for it. Time spent watching TV, even prestige TV that's aimed squarely at me and my interests, is time I could be spending reading. I'm getting old, y'all.

**If so, what is wrong with you? Who hurt you? Who is wasting your time for you? Life is too short.

***Which, Jade argues eloquently in one of her Slasher 101s, is actually a stealth entry in the slasher genre. If you want to read said eloquent and persuasive argument, you know what you've got to do.

****Which, boy oh boy, Stephen Graham Jones might have written this scenario just for me, because my family got priced out of my birthplace not long after I was born, and are watching the same thing happen at a slightly slower pace in the town to which we moved (both in Wyoming) right now. The former was actually a lost cause before I was born; we were only there for my dad's state job; the latter started getting eaten by Big Carpetbag Money before I was born as well, but the first development didn't quite kill off the host the way the second wave now is. For more on what Big Carpetbag Money can do to quaint little rural areas, I'll refer you to Justin Farrell's excellent analysis in Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West.

Jessica Mitford's THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH REVISITED

In 1963, investigative journalist Jessica Mitford, youngest of the amazing brood of literary siblings that includes my beloved "U and Non-U" Nancy, published a tartly observed expose of the American funeral industry that opened a lot of eyes and angered a lot of undertaker funeral director grief therapists and made her a hero to the kind of flinty-eyed, savvy observers and consumers of American culture that I would most like to be myself.

At that time, The American Way of Death focused mostly on the racket of coffin casket sales and marketing and the budding collusion between undertakers and florists and other providers of goods and services used in disposing of honoring the dead during the apex of American civilization. The coming of giant funeral home conglomerates, industrial-scale mausoleum development and aggressive "pre-need" marketing was hinted at but still, in the 1960s, still all just potential. For this newer edition, published in 1998, The American Way of Death Revisited took on those developments with just as jaundiced, as funny, as tartly observed glee as the original work, and while yes, it disgusted me in many ways, it also made me laugh the way Paul "Dumbing of America" Fussell makes me laugh: bitterly but heartily.

I haven't had direct experience with this industry as yet, but sooner or later I will, and I'm already mad at the kind of crap they're going to try to pull. Suggesting, for instance, that cremation is disrespectful but that if I must I still have to buy a casket to cremate someone in (not true). Insisting that the body is required by to be embalmed as a public safety measure (not true). Intimating that I'm a bad, cold, unfeeling person if I don't shell out for embalming and for a big fancy satin lined casket and an open casket funeral so everybody can look at the deceased one last time looking better than he or she ever did in life (!) and a for vault to go over the casket and protect it from the elements and by the way it's really more tasteful to buy a bronze plaque to go over the hole in the ground where you stash the meat than to have a headstone made by a monumental mason. Because the bronze plaque manufacturers are our sort but those headstone people are really not the thing, you know. And don't even talk about scattering ashes, horrors!

By the way, as Mitford confirms (I had long suspected it but never been sure) embalming isn't really preservation at all; it's pretty much just an exercise in human taxidermy, its aim to make the corpse look good for that open casket funeral; its effects start to go to crap almost before the earth hits the coffin lid internment. You're paying to have your loved one (wink at Evelyn Waugh fans) stuffed and mounted like an elk head for display so that your friends and family can admire the taxidermist's embalmer's handiwork* so they'll choose him or her when it's their turn to let someone go.

 But I'm only scratching the surface of what's disinterred here. The Death Industry has, we learn, lobbyists every bit as powerful and persuasive as Wall Street, and they've skewed so many laws and codes in that industry's favor that it's hard to tell what the consumer's rights still even are. I'm sure it's only gotten worse since 1998. I'm waiting for pre-need funeral ads to start showing up in the margins of my Gmail. And the grief therapist marketing spam. And...

And it's all such a horrible mess, really, because the majority of Americans seem to think a big showy expensive open casket funeral is traditional and only decent and anyone who doesn't opt for this must be an unfeeling jerk who hated his deceased; i.e., the marketing has been successful as hell. So now the "conventions" the Death Industry pretty much invented to squeeze more money out of the recently bereaved (preying on their emotional vulnerability unconscionably) really are what's expected. Only the very strong and stubborn are coming out of the experience with their fleeces intact, I suspect.

But, you know, you can't take it with you. Whatever your culture's funeral customs.

*It's impossible not to think of John Waters' gleeful turn as a funeral director in My Name Is Earl, he of the "living tableau." And yes, Six Feet Under too, of course. But I think Waters did it way better. Because John Waters. Der.

Bella DePaulo's SINGLED OUT #OneBookAtATime

I'm tempted, this time around, to just share all the passages I highlighted, but that would just be lazy, and would probably somehow confirm some of you in your stereotyping of older single women as selfish and flippant and useless and whatnot. Heh.

For yea, I am one of those, unashamedly in my 40s and not only unmarried but uninterested in changing that, and I've been the target of every single (heh) one of the crappy remarks, employment practices, interrogations and dismissals Bella DePaulo calls out as a sneaky form of prejudice she names "singleism." But I did not turn to Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After for a categorical list of injustices to get steamed up over, nor did DePaulo intend the book as any kind of call to arms (though she does devote a chapter towards the end to imagining, maybe a little wistfully, what an America that did not discriminate against the never-married, the divorced or the widowed might look like); that last bit of the subtitle, in white lettering on the cover, is key. For while we do get a laundry list of ways in which daily, if not hourly, encounters with "smug marrieds" can be emotionally and psychologically draining, in which popular media (fictional and "reality") dismisses categorically the idea that choosing not to hunt down a spouse is in any way valid (or possible), in which the government denies singles the right to designate a beneficiary for their Social Security checks in the event of their deaths but lets widowed spouses keep on getting paid for life, in which businesses routinely demand that singles pay extra to subsidize their cheaper-per-person couples rates for travel and dining and entertainment, in which employers assume that just because one is not married one is always free to work the extra hours or take the unwanted business trip (and not only that, but really owes it to married co-workers not to tear them away from their all-important families) -- that is not, by a long shot, all that we get.

What we also get is someone who doesn't take media reports of half-assed scientific studies at face value (DePaulo is herself a scientist). She looks at the data herself, shows it to us, and in the process debunks most of the popular mythology that says marriage is better for one. For instance, she finds in study after study purporting to "prove" that married people are happier and healthier that the data was "cheated" -- those happy healthy people who got counted as married were only the ones who were still married. All those divorced and widowed people got clumped in with the never-marrieds, and, let's be honest, dragged our numbers way down. When the data was broken into four, rather than two, categories (still-married, never-married, divorced, widowed) the still-marrieds come out on top, but by a negligible margin (and, interestingly, in one study that did not, as most of these do, look at just a single snapshot of time but instead over a good long period of subjects' lives, on average those "still marrieds" had started out marginally happier to begin with). Who's next happiest? Oh, look, the never marrieds. But all those "how to find a spouse" and "case for marriage" and "single people suck" crusaders rarely, if ever, mention that.

And, too, the book is loaded with anecdotes about unmarried lives, with or without children, which positively brim with unrecognized quality of life -- Condoleeza Rice's, for instance; David Souter's (the book was written before Elena Kagan joined the Supreme Court, but I bet she is a part of DePaulo's pantheon now!); Ralph Nader's; Barbara Walters'. What would our world have been like without them taking on the demanding and challenging roles they did?* And how do you think it feels in interview after interview to always be asked (usually by a "smug married" journo) if it doesn't all feel kind of hollow without a special someone to share it with? And if the high-achieving single in the hot seat says something along the lines of "anything but hollow" well, he or she is just in denial or doesn't understand what he or she is missing, and probably isn't mature enough anyway.

Unsaid, most of the time, is that hey, the married person doesn't understand what he or she is missing, either.

But so, once again, I'm part of the choir being preached to, here. I am sometimes lonely, I'll admit, but it's not the lack of a spouse I feel so much as the lack of intimate friends in close proximity; the city in which I live is a profoundly heartlandish one, in which life is centered around the spouse and kids and offers little to those without them but doing time in a bar, and I've had difficulty establishing relationships in which I'm anything more than a casual once-in-a-while pal, someone to see a movie with once or twice a year but otherwise on whom it's perfectly okay to cancel last-minute because hey, I didn't have to hire a babysitter or whaever. I have wonderful friendships all over the world, even in other parts of Wyoming, but the city where my job is considers non-marrieds like me to be all but lepers, and that's even before it's discovered that I'm "not even trying." Which, contrary to smug married belief, does not mean I've given up; just that I've never really considered OMGGOTTAFINDAHUSBAAAAAAAND just for the sake of HAVINGAHUSBAAAAAAND to be much of a priority. Should I actually find someone who makes me want to give up my single life, that's fine, but I find the idea that I should devote my time and energy to finding someone who wants to shackle me to be patently absurd. To say nothing of finding someone who wants to knock me up; that's easy (and anyway, there's such a thing as Zero Population Growth, in which I fervently believe and furthermore believe I should practice what I preach).

Someone, and I'm pretty sure it was Theodore Sturgeon in his wonderful novel Godbody, once observed that people who hate being alone do not consider themselves good company. I first read that book when I was a teenager, and I think I probably took this message (one of the many many wonderful and wise things Sturgeon shared in that and his other writing) very much to heart; I have cultivated myself to be good company for myself -- and I have also developed a talent for enjoying strangers -- some of my favorite memories are of random conversations in airport bars or on trains or in line at a coffee bar or walking my dog. I seem very good at reading people and finding common ground with them, enough to make them smile for a moment or a few hours. Would I have this talent, I wonder, if I'd spent most of my life hunting down and then focusing to the exclusion of everyone else on a husband who must be, by contemporary dogma, "my everything" (and will expect that of me in return)?

Would I have the time and attention to spend on my friends' children when they need a break from being someone's spawn or student and just want to be a person for a little while? Or just need a little help with some science homework?

And this is not even mentioning the online relationships I've established, many of which go back decades, that I value deeply.

Is there a tinge of whining to DePaulo's book, as some have complained? Yes. But she is very careful not to even appear to equate singleism with all of the serious civil rights/discrimination issues that have beset us as a society (racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc), and seems more interested in teasing out why treating singles as they so often get treated is still okay (perhaps the last remaining prejudice it's still okay to have, though fat shaming is still awfully common even among people who consider themselves enlightened and tolerant), and what the cumulative effects of these subtle annoyances and expectations might be over a life time -- and how remarkable and awesome it is that single people manage to be happy anyway. It takes more guts and fortitude, she says, to be single in a "matrimaniacal" society than to do the expected, conformist thing and get married. Which, now I just want to race home to my worrying (still married) (to each other) parents (both their daughters are now gleefully in their 40s and unattached) and crow to them about how their lack of grandchildren and sons-in-law is actually proof of how awesome they were in raising us; we both grew up self-sufficient, brave, strong, capable and emotionally mature enough to enjoy life without the need for A PARTNER. And anyway, from a ZPG standpoint, our family is already in the red (our cousins have not only replaced themselves, but the two of us, too, and one more to spare).


But so anyway, the next time you see a couple of early middle aged broads yucking it up at a riverside diner or in the local hot springs or having coffee and none of us happens to be wearing a ring on that finger, maybe withhold your certainty and judgment -- and your humblebragging pity -- for a moment. There are lots of ways to live a life. And lots more ways to be happy than just sharing a bed with somebody for a few decades. But if you must make a faux-friendly remark about it, be prepared to be patronized back in return. Poor little marrieds, like Linuses and their blankies, will they ever grow up? We don't really want to bust out rhetoric like that, but push us and we just might.

Go, Bella, go!

*DePaulo has some somewhat tart remarks about some what-might-have-beens that the choice to put spouse above country/public sphere duty prevented, namely: President Colin Powell.