In every act, even evil, in the evil of punishment just as much as in the evil of guilt, God's glory is equally revealed and shines forth. Meister Eckhart. from Articles condemned in the Bull of John XXII   The end of the striptease is then no longer to drag into the light, a hidden depth, but to signify through the shedding of an incongruous and artifical clothing, nakedness as a natural vesture of a woman, which amounts in the end to regaining a perfectly chaste state of the flesh. Roland Barthes from "Striptease"   The process of a girl's becoming a woman depends very much on the clitoris passing on this sensitivity to the vaginal orifice in good time and completely. In cases of what is known as sexual anaesthesia in women the clitoris has obstinately retained its sensitivity. Sigmund Freud from "The Sexual Life of Human Beings"   pointing out the hole it spread here, there, opening that some of the heat would escape, some of the painstakingly gathered bits of meat and kleenex left behind Heather Ramsdell I thought of the pit which used to be right next to the building, the bottomless pit that had inspired shivers of fear at night, not only in me but in all the pretty children, girls, and adults who lived on all the floors.... They were afraid of the secret inside themselves as if fearful of a past sin that could not stay buried in the past for all eternity. Eventually they forgot about the pit, its memories and secrets as well as what it contained, like instinctive animals who scratch some dirt to conceal their disgrace. One morning, waking up from a black nightmare that seethed with human faces, I discovered that the pit had been covered over. It was then that I understood with horror, gripped by the same nightmarish feeling, that the pit had been turned inside out, and it now rose out of the site that was once called the pit. They had a new way of referring to this new space that brought mystery and death up to our very windows; they called this dark well the air shaft. Orhan Pamuk from The Black Book         Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book (A Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York 1996) is translated by Güneli Gün. The text from Miester Eckhart is translated by M.O'C. Walshe in Sermons and Treatises, Vol. 1 (Element Inc., Rockport, MA, 1991). The passage from Roland Barthes is translated by Jonathan Cape and can be found in Mythologies (The Noonday Press, Farrar Strauss & Giroux, New York, 1972). Sigmund Freud's remark comes from the Introductory Lectures on Psycholanalysis (trans. James Strachey--W.W. Norton, New York, 1966).