✥ Under each of the following extracts, mark “J” for John Paul II or “S” for Simone de Beauvoir. An answer key can be found on page 11.

1. The curse weighing on marriage is that individuals too often join together in their weakness and not in their strength, that each one asks of the other rather than finding pleasure in giving.
2. It will be possible for the woman to love in her strength and not in her weakness, not to escape from herself but to find herself, not out of resignation but to affirm herself . . . the source of life and not a mortal danger.
3. The conflict can be overcome by the free recognition of each individual in the other, each one positing both itself and the other as object and as subject in a reciprocal movement. But friendship and generosity, which accomplish this recognition of freedoms concretely, are not easy virtues.
4. The couple is a fundamental unit with the two halves riveted to each other.
5. This ecstasy is neither sacrifice nor abandon; there is no question of either sex letting itself be swallowed up by the other; neither the man nor the woman should be like a broken fragment of a couple; one’s sex is not a wound; each one is a complete being . . . the sexual act is without annexation, without surrender of either partner, the marvelous fulfillment of each other.
6. To have a child is to take on a commitment; if the mother shrinks from it, she commits an offense against human existence, against a freedom; but no one can impose it on her. The relation of parents to children, like that of spouses, must be freely chosen.
7. The two sexes are necessary for each other.
8. But there is a curse they rarely escape: boredom. Whether the husband succeeds in making his wife an echo of himself, or whether each one entrenches himself in his universe, they have nothing else to share with each other after a few months or years. The couple is a community whose members have lost their autonomy without escaping their solitude; they are statically assimilated to each other instead of sustaining a dynamic and lively relation together; this is why they can give nothing to each other, exchange nothing on a spiritual or erotic level.
9. It [childrearing] can bring joy only to the woman capable of disinterestedly wanting the happiness of another, to the woman who seeks to transcend her own existence without any reward for her.
10. Equal loves are possible.

✥ Things that fascinate me: the Transfiguration of our Lord, the Annunciation and Assumption of our Blessed Mother; ghosts, witches, practitioners of the occult, the frauds of Simon Magus reported by Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, the obscure beliefs and practices of the Boxer Rebels, the Old Man of the Mountain; remote places—the steppes of Central Asia, the crofts of the Hebrides, Bear Island, Hokkaido; the saints of Anglo-Saxon England and Cornwall and Wales; very long books, beautifully decorated books of devotion, dull diplomatic papers and letters full of gossip unread in dust-filled archives; late spring rain, early autumn snow, the abscission of leaves, fields of lavender, vast bodies of water covered with ice, dark forests; experts in obscure languages (though not the languages themselves) and academic works on obscure subjects; the courtiers of the nineteenth-century papal court, eccentric clergymen, starving men of letters who write out of desperation; withdrawn, world-weary pious maidens, celibate knights riding forth in search of the Holy Grail, hermits blessed with visions; the Heavenly Host, guardian angels, the burning sword of Michael at the gates of Eden; references to elves or goblins or fairies in the works of poets; the rings of Saturn.

Things that repel me: tone-deafness; men with leering eyes; tattoos; impiety and secularism; monsters; slugs, spiders, dogs with foul breath and slobbering tongues; logistics; the self-satisfied language of improvement; the dark.

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—Matthew Walther