"Joy as the Lodestar: A Year in Reading and Living"

"For more than half a decade I thought I’d be moving on any second. Early twenties turned to late twenties. I lived alone, worked from home and sometimes stayed in for days on end; my bad ideas were my business, I thought. I learned how to be alone in that apartment, how to enjoy my own company and then to prefer it, but I’d come to know myself well enough to hate me with accuracy. Someone pointed out that my apartment felt like my viscera: you could diagram my thought process by connecting where I left the laundry detergent to the angle at which a book stack toppled. Over the years I became more judicious about who I brought home...

We slept five feet apart and got up at seven a.m. to work together at the harvest table. We barely slept, and though we should have been exhausted, the days felt both panicked and effortless thanks to the rapid current we’d mounted somehow. Our bliss was overwhelming, pathological, a little bit creepy. The joy was painful; it nearly busted our sides. “How can we have these many feelings?” I said to Haley one day — we spoke to each other in hyperbole — and she looked back in searing agreement. “Like,” she paused. “I’m a pretty small person.”...

“One’s own best self,” writes Gornick. “For centuries, this was the key concept behind any essential definition of friendship: that one’s friend is a virtuous being who speaks to the virtue in oneself. How foreign is such a concept to the children of the therapeutic culture! Today we do not look to see, much less affirm, our best selves in one another. To the contrary, it is the openness with which we admit to our emotional incapacities — the fear, the anger, the humiliation — that excites contemporary bonds of friendship… It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are.”"

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/joy-as-the-lodestar-a-year-in-reading-and-living?mod=e2this

This essay was fluttery and lovely.