Tag: quality

• February 22, 2014

  Emily Dickinson on being in pain

  In ‘Pain Has an Element of Blank,’ the poet Emily Dickinson (1830-86) seeks to bring into sharper focus the unique quality of being in extraordinary pain. That quality is expressed in a particular experience of time. She writes, PAIN has an element of blank; It cannot recollect When it began, or if there were A…
• October 22, 2012

  On eating properly and ‘two kinds of quantity’

  I don’t believe that calories–this unit of measure–is a good way of talking about food in general, of talking about ‘how much’ I need to eat or how I go about conceptualizing what it is I eat. My doubts about ‘the calorie’ are born of my wholesale rejection of what goes under the header of…