“That evening it clicked for me. I loved opera because of its freakish achievement: singing that way required years of honing a set of otherwise-useless faculties until they became more than human, and thus inhuman. I was, at the time, in the middle of a PhD program, another method of training a small muscle to make it bulge in a way I considered beautiful and others thought perverse. Ballet, like opera, is wonderful because it is monstrous, the hyper-development of skills nobody needs, a twisting of human bodies and souls into impossible positions, the purchase of light with blood.”

Longreads, February 2017