Bitter

Veblen asked too many questions, suffered from a constitutional inability to say yes.
Socrates asked questions, drank down the bitter drink one night when the first cock crowed,
but Veblen
drank it in little sips through a long life in the stuffiness of classrooms, the dust of libraries, the staleness of cheap flats such as a poor instructor can afford. He fought the bogy all right, pedantry, routine, timeservers at office desks, trustees, collegepresidents, the plump flunkies of the ruling businessmen, all the good jobs kept for yesmen, never enough money, every broadening hope thwarted. Veblen drank the bitter drink all right.

Bitter can be made sweet through the masking of taste, as can the sweet be made bitter. This is true, as well, of emotional bitterness.

I like bitter things, grapefruit juice, all of that. Most likely I'm a bitter person, which is why people avoid me – but since I'm bitter, if they didn't avoid me already I'd be wracking my brains trying to figure out how to get them to.
Cyanide, I hear, smells like bitter almonds.

Without bitter, there would be no bittersweet.

It is unsettling how sharply love can twist into contempt. First I watched her become someone other than the person I fell in love with, now I must watch myself become someone I do not want to be.