He [Charles Carleton Coffin] then reproduced for readers Gage’s version of [Sojourner] Truth’s speech at Akron, interrupting the chapter’s journalism for nine pages of small type that biographers of Truth analyze to this day in sorting through connections of women’s freedom to abolition.
via David Roediger, Seizing Freedom. (Verso)
sex is less about the will than about the great chain of being that linked humans to the gods and to the stars. Sex was the moment when human beings allowed themselves to sink back into the embrace of a universe into which their own bodies had been ingeniously woven. They would draw on the life-giving energies of a vast world. Sex was the gift of ever-present gods. Like wine, itself the gift of the god Dionysos, sex filled the body with “an immanent divine force, and the wash of its warm energy was experienced as a communion” with the divine.
Rome: Sex & Freedom By Peter Brown. nybooks.com
