Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  2 Travels with Paula A s a medical student I was taught the fine art of looking, listening, and touching. I looked at vermilion throats, bulging eardrums, and the serpentine arterial rivulets in the retina. I listened to the hiss of mitral murmurs, the gurgling tubas of the intestines, the cacophony of respiratory rales. I felt the slippery edges of spleens and livers, the tautness of ovarian cysts, the marbled hardness of prostatic cancer. Learning about patients—yes, that was the business of medical school. But to learn from patients—that aspect of my higher education came much later. Perhaps it began with my professor, John Whitehorn, who often said, “Listen to your patients; let them teach you. To grow wise you must remain a student.” And he meant much more than the banal truth that the good listener learns more about the patient. He meant quite literally that we should allow our patients to teach us. A formal, awkward, courtly man whose gleaming pate was fringed with a fastidiously clipped crescent of gray hair, John Whitehorn was the distinguished chairman of the Johns Hopkins Department of Psychiatry for thirty years. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles and had no superfluous features—not a wrinkle in his face, or in the brown suit he wore every day of the year (he must have, we surmised, two or three identical ones in his closet). And no superfluous expressions: when he lectured his lips moved; all else—hands, cheeks, eyebrows—remained remarkably still. During my third year of psychiatric residency five classmates and I spent every Thursday afternoon making rounds with Dr. Whitehorn. Beforehand we had lunch in his oak-paneled office. The fare was simple and unvarying—sandwiches of tuna, cold cuts, and cold Chesapeake Bay crab cake, followed by fruit salad and flattened pecan pie—but served with Southern elegance: linen tablecloth, glistening silver trays, bone china. The lunch conversation was long and leisurely. Though each of us had calls to return and patients clamoring for attention, there was no way to rush Dr. Whitehorn, and ultimately even I, the most frenetic of the group, learned to put time on hold. In these two hours we had the opportunity to ask our professor anything: I remember asking him about such matters as the genesis of paranoia, a physician’s responsibility to the suicidal, the incompatibility between therapeutic change and determinism. Though he responded fully, he clearly preferred other subjects: the accuracy of Persian archers, the comparative quality of Greek versus Spanish marble, the major blunders of the battle of Gettysburg, his improved periodic table (he was originally trained as a chemist). After lunch Dr. Whitehorn began interviewing in his office the four or five patients on his service while we silently observed.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  —Don Hanlon Johnson, PhD, professor of Somatics at California Institute of Integral Studies, founder of the first accredited graduate studies program in the field and author of Bone, Breath, and Gesture: Practices of Embodiment and Everyday Hopes, Utopian Dreams: Reflections on American Ideals “For more than forty years, Peter Levine has gently, humorously, and with stunning simplicity, shown us how trauma responses are part of a brilliant psychological self-protection system; a protection system that we, professionals and laypeople alike, unwittingly block with our many ‘normal’ responses. If you want to grasp the essence of how and why the trauma response can help people heal, read this book. If you want to help a traumatized person lessen the impact of the trauma while it’s happening, read this book. If you want to understand your own journey through stress and trauma, read this book. If you want some trail markers for a path from the daze of dissociation to the reemergence of deep vibrant aliveness and spiritual feeling, read this book.” —Marianne Bentzen, international trainer in Neuroaffective Psychotherapy, Copenhagen, Denmark “Peter Levine conveys his profound scientific understanding of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) so vividly that the reader can sense, feel and identify with the many traumatized children and adults he has worked with. Levine helps us to understand the complexity of PTSD seen from the outside as well as felt from the inside. He invites us into a spiritual dimension that draws equally on science and experience. Through his poetic style the reader is conducted from the built-in reactions of the nervous system to deep mental scars, and to how the skilled PTSD therapist can guide far-reaching healing processes. Levine’s understanding is vast in its scope, from an evolutionary understanding of the source of trauma to a spiritual dimension of how we as human beings can be strengthened by healing from trauma.” —Susan Hart, Danish psychologist, author of Brain, Attachment, Personality: An Introduction to Neuroaffective Development and The Impact of Attachment: Developmental Neuroaffective Psychology “This book stands as a worthy sequel to Levine’s groundbreaking Waking the Tiger. He expands his concepts of the neurophysiological basis for trauma with a thorough review of the science of trauma and his own creative theories, providing rich insights for application to the business of healing. Valuable case studies illustrate the ‘whys’ of the behavior of the trauma victim, and useful tools help the therapist enlist the body in the process.” —Robert Scaer, MD, author of The Trauma Spectrum and The Body Bears the Burden

• From Cleanness (2020)

  MENTORWe had agreed to meet at the fountain in front of the McDonald’s in Slaveykov Square. By my American standards G. was late, and as I waited for him I browsed the book stalls the square is famous for, their wares piled high under awnings in front of the city library. Really it wasn’t a fountain anymore, it had been shuttered for years, since faulty wiring stopped a man’s heart one summer as he dipped his fingers into the cool water there. It was December now, though winter hadn’t yet really taken hold; the sun was out and the weather was mild, it wasn’t unpleasant to stand for a bit and browse the books on display. From the beginning of the year G. had caught my attention, at first simply because he was beautiful, and then for the special quality of friendship I thought I saw between him and another boy in my class, the intensity with which G. sought him out and the privacy he drew about them. It was familiar to me, that intensity, a story from my own adolescence, as was the basking ambivalence with which the other boy received it, how he both invited it and held it off. I had some idea, then, what we would talk about, and why school didn’t offer enough secrecy for us to talk about it there, but I was still curious: he wasn’t a student I was particularly close to, he didn’t stop by my room outside of class, he had never confided in me or sought me out, and I wondered what crisis was bringing him to me now.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 4: The priestly vestment signifies, not the power given to the priest, but the aptitude required of him for exercising the act of that power. Wherefore a character is imprinted neither on the priest nor on anyone else at the giving of a vestment. Reply to Objection 5: The deacon’s power is midway between the subdeacon’s and the priest’s. For the priest exercises a power directly on Christ’s body, the subdeacon on the vessels only, and the deacon on Christ’s body contained in a vessel. Hence it is not for him to touch Christ’s body, but to carry the body on the paten, and to dispense the blood with the chalice. Consequently his power, as to the principal act, could not be expressed, either by the giving of the vessel only, or by the giving of the matter; and his power is expressed as to the secondary act alone, by his receiving the book of the Gospels, and this power is understood to contain the other; wherefore the character is impressed at the handing of the book. Reply to Objection 6: The act of the acolyte whereby he serves with the cruet ranks before his act of carrying the torch; although he takes his name from the secondary act, because it is better known and more proper to him. Hence the acolyte receives the character when he is given the cruet, by virtue of the words uttered by the bishop. OF THOSE WHO CONFER THIS SACRAMENT (TWO ARTICLES)We must now consider those who confer this sacrament. Under this head there are two points of inquiry: (1) Whether a bishop alone can confer this sacrament? (2) Whether a heretic or any other person cut off from the Church can confer this sacrament? Whether a bishop alone confers the sacrament of Order?Objection 1: It would seem that not only a bishop confers the sacrament of Order. For the imposition of hands has something to do with the consecration. Now not only the bishop but also the assisting priests lay hands on the priests who are being ordained. Therefore not only a bishop confers the sacrament of Order. Objection 2: Further, a man receives the power of Order, when that which pertains to the act of his Order is handed to him. Now the cruet with water, bowl* and towel, are given to the subdeacon by the archdeacon; as also the candlestick with candle, and the empty cruet to the acolyte. [*”Bacili.” The rubric has “aquamanili.” Some texts of the Summa have “mantili” (“maniple”), but the archdeacon does not give the maniple to the subdeacon.] Therefore not only the bishop confers the sacrament of Order. Objection 3: Further, that which belongs to an Order cannot be entrusted to one who has not the Order. Now the conferring of minor Orders is entrusted to certain persons who are not bishops, for instance to Cardinal priests. Therefore the conferring of Orders does not belong to the episcopal Order.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  42. And David himself saith in the book of Psalms, The LORD. said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, 43. Till I make thine enemies thy footstool. 44. David therefore calleth him Lord, how is he then his son? THEOPHYLACT. Although our Lord was shortly about to enter on His Passion, He proclaims His own Godhead, and that too neither incautiously nor boastfully, but with modesty. For He puts a question to them, and having thrown them into perplexity, leaves them to reason out the conclusion; as it follows, And he said unto them, How say they that Christ is David’s son? AMBROSE. They are not blamed here because they acknowledge Him to be David’s Son, for the blind man for so doing was thought worthy to be healed. (Luke 18:42.) And the children saying, Hosanna to the Son of David, (Matt. 21:9.) rendered to God the glory of the highest praise; but they are blamed because they believe Him not to be the Son of God. Hence it is added, And David himself saith in the book of Psalms, The Lord said unto my Lord. (Ps. 110:1.) Both the Father is Lord and the Son is Lord, but there are not two Lords, but one Lord, for the Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Father. He Himself sits at the right hand of the Father, for He is coequal with the Father, inferior to none; for it follows, Sit thou at my right hand. He is not honoured by sitting at the right hand, nor is He degraded by being sent. Degrees of dignity are not sought for, where is the fulness of divinity. AUGUSTINE. (de Symbolo. ad Catech. l. ii. c. 7.) By the sitting we must not conceive a posture of the human limbs, as if the Father sat on the left and the Son on: the right, but the right hand itself we must interpret to be the power which that Man received who was taken up into Himself by God, that He should come to judge, who at first came to be judged. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Or, that He sits on the Father’s right hand proves His heavenly glory. For whose throne is equal, their Majesty is equal. But sitting when it is said of God signifies a universal kingdom and power. Therefore He sitteth at the right hand of the Father, because the Word proceeding from the substance of the Father, being made flesh, putteth not off His divine glory. THEOPHYLACT. He manifests then that He is not opposed to the Father, but agrees with Him, since the Father resists the Son’s enemies, Until I make thine enemies thy footstool.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  We do not share these negative views of Paul, even as we are quite willing to say he was wrong about some things. To see Paul positively does not mean endorsing everything he ever wrote. But we are among his admirers. We see him as an appealing apostle of Jesus whose vision of life “in Christ”—one of his favored phrases—is remarkably faithful to the message and vision of Jesus himself. When we take into account the different circumstances of their activity—Jesus addressing Jews living in the Jewish homeland and Paul addressing Jews and Gentiles in the cities of the Roman Empire beyond the Jewish homeland—Paul emerges as a faithful apostle of the radical Jesus who became his Lord. For many people, meeting this Paul will be like meeting Paul again for the first time. MEETING PAUL AGAIN We begin by placing Paul in time and space. In Chapter 3, we will treat the life of Paul in some detail. For now, we provide some markers, beginning with Jesus. Jesus was born around 4 BCE, possibly a year or two earlier. In the late 20s, he began his public activity and was soon executed by Roman imperial authority, most likely in the year 30 CE. We don’t know when Paul was born, but the most probable guess is the first decade of the first century. The basis for the guess is simple. Paul lived, and lived robustly, into the 60s of the first century. It is unlikely that he was in his seventies or eighties by then. Thus, Paul and Jesus were roughly contemporary, Paul not much younger than Jesus. Though both were Jewish, they grew up in very different settings: Jesus in a small Jewish village in Galilee; Paul in Tarsus, a significant city in southern Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey. Jesus lived his life in the Jewish homeland. Paul was a product of the Jewish “Diaspora,” a term referring to Jewish communities outside of the homeland. We first hear of Paul in Acts a few years after Jesus’s crucifixion. In Acts 7, in Jerusalem, he is present at the killing by stoning of a follower of Jesus named Stephen, commonly spoken of as the first Christian martyr. The story of Stephen’s martyrdom ends in Acts 8:1 with the terse comment: “And Saul approved of their killing him.” Saul—his name would be changed to Paul after his conversion—was probably in his twenties and almost certainly not much over thirty. We next hear of him in Acts 9. Still named Saul, he is now himself persecuting followers of Jesus. Then, three to five years after Jesus’s death, Saul had a life-changing experience of the risen Christ near or in Damascus in Syria. It transformed him from Saul, the persecutor of Jesus, to Paul, the apostle of Jesus to the Gentiles. For about twenty-five years thereafter, on foot and by sea, Paul traversed the eastern Roman Empire, mostly in Asia Minor and Greece, finally ending up in Rome.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I had been sitting too long now, I was steeling myself to go, when with a sudden increase of noise and a change of pressure, a slight disorder in the air, the door opened and R. came in. He was wearing a hat and scarf and a heavy winter coat, though it wasn’t very cold; but then he was from a warm country, it was his first real fall. He grew up in the Azores, and though his town seemed beautiful in the photos I had found online, orderly white houses brilliant against the sea, he would never go back there, he said; it was a small place, he hated small places. He saw me right away, and without waiting to be greeted by a server he began making his way over, pulling off his hat and scarf as he walked. I was struck again by his beauty, which was offhand and accidental, with his disheveled hair and ruffled clothes, a beauty stripped of self-regard. Even though it was familiar to me I felt it as a kind of physical force, not welcoming me but pushing me off, so that I was always astonished to find I could take him in my arms. This was what I did now, embracing him though I had intended to remain seated, to greet him coolly and punish him a little. We parted after a second or two, but not before I heard R. make a sound I had come to love, a little grunt of happiness, a homecoming sound, and all my irritation drained away. It’s crazy outside, he said as he sat down, gesturing to the window beside us, it’s totally crazy, I’ve never seen anything like it, have you—but he went on before I could answer. He was sorry he was late, he said, he was supposed to go to a party but had bowed out at the last minute, and then it had been hard to persuade his roommate to go on without him. I thought I wouldn’t be able to come, R. said, and I made a noncommittal sound, feeling my annoyance return. Oh, he said, are you mad, and he wore an expression of such openness and willingness to be in the wrong that it was impossible to stay angry. I told him it was all right, that he shouldn’t worry, it was nothing. No, he said, it isn’t nothing, I hate that I can’t see you when I want to, and he made a small gesture with his hand, extending it slightly toward mine. We couldn’t touch, of course, it would be imprudent, but he flexed his fingers in a way that I knew meant desire, that though he was touching the polished wood it was me he wanted to touch. This was clear in his expression, too, when I looked at his face and he said very softly, almost mouthing it, Skupi , one of the few words of Bulgarian he had learned.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  I’ve transferred my personal experience to my professional work as a clinician, teacher, and consultant working in cross-cultural psychology. Having focused on cultural transition, I’ve specifically worked with three populations: refugee families and international families (the two groups that move most these days, albeit for very different reasons) and intercultural couples (which include interracial and interfaith pairings). For intercultural couples, the cultural shifts do not stem from a geographic move, but instead take place in their own living rooms. What really piqued my interest was how this merging of cultures influenced gender relations and child-rearing practices. I pondered the many meanings of marriage, and how its role and its place in the larger family system varies in different national contexts. Is it a private act of two individuals or a communal affair between two families? In my sessions with couples, I tried to discern the cultural nuances behind the discussion of commitment, intimacy, pleasure, orgasm, and the body. Love may be universal, but its constructions in each culture are defined, both literally and figuratively, in different languages. I was particularly sensitive to the conversations about child and adolescent sexuality because it is in messages to children that societies most reveals their values, goals, incentives, prohibitions. I speak eight languages. Some I learned at home, some at school, a few during my travels, and one or two through love. In my practice, I am called on to use my multicultural proficiency as well as my skill as a polyglot. My patients are straight and gay (I don’t work with the transgender population at this time), married, committed, single, and remarried. They are young, old, and in between. They cover a wide spectrum of cultures, race, and class. Their individual stories highlight the cultural and psychological forces that shape how we love and how we desire. One of my most formative personal experiences underlying this book may seem circuitous, but I must reveal it to you, as it sheds a light on the deeper motivations that fuel my passion. My parents were survivors of Nazi concentration camps. For a number of years, they stood face-to-face with death every day. My mother and father were the sole survivors of their respective families. They came out of this experience wanting to charge at life with a vengeance and to make the most of each day. They both felt that they had been granted a unique gift: living life again. My parents were unusual, I think. They didn’t just want to survive; they wanted to revive. They possessed a thirst for life, thrived on exuberant experiences, and loved to have a good time. They cultivated pleasure. I know absolutely nothing about their sexual life except that they had two children, my brother and me. But by the way they lived, I sensed that they had a deep understanding of eroticism.

• From Story of O (1954)

  The Truth about the RevoltStrange, that the notion of happiness in slavery should today seem so novel. There is virtually nothing left of the ancient law which gives the family the power of life and death over their children; corporal punishment and hazing have practically been eliminated from the schools, and the old prerogative of wife-beating banished from the home. Men who in past centuries were proudly decapitated on public squares are now left cheerlessly to rot in dank cellars. The only tortures we inflict these days are undeserved and anonymous ones. Therefore, they are a thousand times more terrible, and wars today manage to roast, in a single, searing blast, the population of an entire city. The excessive kindness of father, teacher, or lover is paid for by blankets of napalm bombs and the atomic explosion. Everything happens as though there exists in the world a mysterious equilibrium of violence, for which we have lost all taste, and even our understanding of the term. And, personally, I am not displeased that it is a woman who has found them again. I am not even surprised. To tell the truth, I do not have as many preconceived ideas about women as most men do. I am surprised there are any (women). More than surprised: somewhat amazed and filled with admiration. This perhaps explains why they seem so marvelous to me, and why I can’t stop envying them. What is it precisely that I envy? There are times when I regret my lost childhood. What I regret, though, are not the surprises and the revelations of which the poets speak. No. I remember a time when I thought I was responsible for the whole world. I was by turns a champion boxer or a cook, an orator-politician (yes), a general, a thief, even a redskin, a tree, or a rock. I shall be told that this was only a game. Yes, for you adults it may have been, but not for me, not in the least. This was when I bore the whole weight of the world on my shoulders, with all the cares and dangers it comprised: this is when I was universal. What I am trying to say is this:

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Naturally, as Ernest pondered the rescue of Artemis, the voices of his analyst and supervisor came to mind. Ernest listened and accepted their critique—but only to a point. Deep inside he believed that his overinvestment made him a better therapist, a better human being. Of course women should be rescued. That was an evolutionary truism, a species-survival strategy built into our genes. How horrified he’d been long ago when, in his comparative anatomy course, he had found that the cat he was dissecting had been pregnant and was carrying five tiny, marble-sized fetuses in her uterus. Likewise he abhorred caviar, possible only through the slaughter and plundering of pregnant sturgeon. Most horrifying had been the Nazi extermination policy, that had carried the terror to women housing the “seeds of Sarah.” And so Ernest never questioned his decision to persuade Halston to redress his transgression. “Consider what she must have felt,” he repeatedly asked his patient in subsequent sessions—to which Halston would irritably reply, “Doctor, I’m the patient, not her.” Or Ernest would urge on Halston the wisdom of the eighth and ninth steps of the twelve-step recovery program: Make a list of all persons we have harmed, and make direct amends to such persons whenever possible. But all his arguments, no matter how skillfully put, failed to budge Halston, who seemed unimaginably self-absorbed and callous. Once he chided Ernest for his softheadedness. “Aren’t you overromanticizing this one-night stand? This is her mode of life. I’m not the first man she’s accosted, and probably not the last. I assure you, Doctor, this lady can take care of herself.” Ernest wondered whether Halston had dug in his heels out of sheer spite. Perhaps he had sensed his therapist’s overinvolvement with Artemis and was retaliating by rejecting, automatically, all of Ernest’s advice. But in any event, Ernest gradually realized both that Halston would never make amends to Artemis and that he, Ernest, would have to assume that burden. Curiously, despite his heavy schedule, he did not mind accepting the task. It seemed like a moral imperative, and he began to view it not as a millstone but as his ministry. Curiously too, Ernest, generally self-analytic to a fault, subjecting every whim, every decision, to a searching and tedious scrutiny, never once questioned his motives. He did realize, however, that he was undertaking an unorthodox and illegitimate mission—what other therapist had ever taken it upon himself to make personal amends for his patient’s misdeeds? Despite his realization that secrecy and delicacy were required, Ernest’s first steps were clumsy and transparent: “Halston, one last time. Let’s go over your meeting with Artemis and the type of connection you made with her.” “Not again? As I’ve said, I was in a café when—” “No, try to paint the scene vividly and precisely. Describe the café. The time? Its location?” “It was in Mill Valley, about eight A.M., in one of those quaint California innovations—combination bookstore and café.”

• From Story of O (1954)

  I have never met Pauline Réage, although, through questions of the translation, I have been in indirect communication (via the French publisher, Jean-Jacques Pauvert), and received the author’s comments. I trust I am not betraying a confidence, or appearing immodest, when I say that the author has gone out of her way to say how pleased she is with those portions of the translation she had read. I long puzzled over this unusual display of literary generosity on the part of an author concerning a translator, and only recently did I discover, or suspect I had discovered, the reason for it. There exists an earlier translation of O, made in Paris several years ago. I trust I shall not be accused of a corresponding lack of generosity if I say (and I am not the first, and far from the only one, to say it) that this earlier version is less a translation than an adaptation. It reads somehow as though the adapter-translator were in fact embarrassed by the work: certain parts are glossed over; whole descriptions, nonexistent in the original, are written in; and, indeed, much of the book is paraphrased rather than translated directly. As one who had read the work in French when it first appeared, and admired not only its contents but the extreme felicity of the style, what troubled me most about the earlier English version was its seeming disdain for this obvious style. Subsequently, I learned this translator was a man, and it seemed to me that this fact alone sufficed to explain both the embarrassment—male embarrassment—manifest in his version, and also why Pauline Réage had gone out of her way to comment favorably on mine: Story of O, written by a woman, demands a woman translator, one who will humble herself before the work and be satisfied simply to render it, as faithfully as possible, without interpretation or unwanted elaboration. Faced with a work such as O, male pride, male superiority—however liberal the male, however much he may try to suppress them—will, I am certain, somehow intrude. Like O, therefore, I have tried to humble myself, to remain as faithful as possible (although, if the reader will forgive, I have attempted to stop short of slavishness) to the intent and style of the author.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The force of his delivery was augmented by the particular power that we always give to the words of the dying. The students listened in silence, sensing, as I did, that he was speaking truly, that he had no time for game playing or pretense or fear of consequences. Evelyn’s arrival in the group a month later provided Sal with another opportunity to work at his ministry. Sixty-two years old, embittered, and gravely ill with leukemia, Evelyn was wheeled into the group with a blood transfusion in process. She was candid about her illness. She knew she was dying: “I can accept that,” she said, “it no longer matters. But what does matter is my daughter. She is poisoning my final days!” Evelyn reviled her daughter, a clinical psychologist, as “a vindictive, unloving woman.” Months earlier they had had a bitter and foolish argument after her daughter, caring for Evelyn’s cat, had fed it the wrong food. Since then they had not spoken to each other. After hearing her out, Sal spoke to her simply and passionately. “Listen to what I have to say, Evelyn. I’m dying too. What does it matter what your cat eats? What does it matter who gives in first? You know you don’t have much time left. Let’s stop pretending. Your daughter’s love is the most important thing in the world to you. Don’t die, please don’t die, without telling her that! It will poison her life, she’ll never recover, and she’ll pass on the poison to her daughter! Break the cycle! Break the cycle, Evelyn!” The appeal worked. Although Evelyn died a few days later, the ward nurses told us that, swayed by Sal’s words, she had had a tearful reconciliation with her daughter. I was very proud of Sal. It was our group’s first triumph! Two more patients joined, and after several months Paula and I were persuaded that we had learned enough to begin working with larger numbers of patients. Now she began to recruit in earnest. Her contacts with the American Cancer Society soon generated a number of referrals. After we had interviewed and accepted seven new patients, all with breast cancer, we officially opened our group for business. At our first full-sized group meeting Paula surprised me when she began the session by reading aloud an old Hasidic tale: A rabbi had a conversation with the Lord about Heaven and Hell. “I will show you Hell,” said the Lord and led the rabbi into a room containing a large round table. The people sitting around the table were famished and desperate.

• From Story of O (1954)

  She, and she alone, set the rules and directed the proceedings (something she never did with men, or only in a most oblique manner). She initiated the discussions and set the rendezvous, the kisses came from her too, so much so that she preferred not to have someone kiss her first, and since she had first had lovers she almost never allowed the girl whom she was caressing to return her caresses. As much as she was in a hurry to behold her girl friend naked, she was equally quick to find excuses why she herself should not undress. She often looked for excuses to avoid it, saying that she was cold, that it was the wrong time of the month for her. And, what is more, rare was the woman in whom she failed to detect some element of beauty. She remembered that, just out of the lycée, she had tried to seduce an ugly, disagreeable, constantly ill-natured little girl for the sole reason that she had a wild mop of blond hair which, by its unevenly cut curls, created a forest of light and shade over a skin that, while lusterless, had a texture which was soft, smooth, and totally flat. But the little girl had repelled her advances, and if one day pleasure had ever lighted up the ungrateful wench’s face, it had not been because of O. For O passionately loved to see faces enveloped in that mist which makes them so young and smooth, a timeless youth that does not restore childhood but enlarges the lips, widens the eyes the way make-up does, and renders the iris sparkling and clear. In this, admiration played a larger part than pride, for it was not her handiwork which moved her: at Roissy she had experienced the same uncomfortable feeling in the presence of the transfigured face of a girl possessed by a stranger. The nakedness and surrender of the bodies overwhelmed her, and she had the feeling that her girl friends, when they simply agreed to display themselves naked in a locked room, were giving her a gift which she could never repay in kind. For the nakedness of vacations, in the sun and on the beaches, made no impression on her—not simply because it was public but because, being public and not absolute, she was to some extent protected from it. The beauty of other women, which with unfailing generosity she was inclined to find superior to her own, nevertheless reassured her concerning her own beauty, in which she saw, whenever she unexpectedly caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror, a kind of reflection of theirs. The power she acknowledged that her girl friends held over her was at the same time a guarantee of her own power over men. And what she asked of women (and never returned, or ever so little), she was happy and found it quite natural that men should be eager and impatient to ask of her. Thus was she constantly and simultaneously the accomplice of both men and women, having, as it were, her cake and eating it too. There were times when the game was not all that easy. That O was in love with Jacqueline, no more and no less than she had been in love with many others, and assuming that the term “in love” (which was saying a great deal) was the proper one, there could be no doubt. But why did she conceal it so?

• From Story of O (1954)

  Jean Paulhan, in his ingeniously arranged Preface, tells us that erotic books—Réage’s book—are dangerous. This is an understatement, and it is my opinion that there is much more seductive virtue in Story of O than in the others. Because innocent souls (if there are any) have an unreasoned but keen taste for suffering, and nothing seduces them so easily as does the view of a martyr. And also because the innocent souls (assuming, also, that they know how to read) will at first glance be put off by the coarse vocabulary of classical erotology, whereas they will find all sorts of allurements in Pauline Réage’s writing, which is incredibly decent in relation to the subjects dealt with. If the writing is not the foremost quality of the book, it is certainly not the least: pure as the writing of the Princesse de Clèves, warm as … I shall refrain from saying what, and of a simple density which emphasizes, or provokes, the movements of the heart. Her writing offers an example, which will not be heeded in an age when writers, following the perfidious example of Céline, have a tendency to use indiscriminately erotic or scatological language, which when used legitimately, can be extremely beautiful and effective. Shall we one day see on the finger of some woman the formidable iron ring which strips the person wearing it of her freedom, since she places her body at the disposal of all those who are able to read the insignia engraved in the setting? And, what is especially important, shall we be able to tell which one is Pauline Réage? Probably not. But already Baudelaire is offering his hand to her, the Portuguese Nun is approaching her a trifle timidly, the Nun of Dülmen is ready to open her arms to her, and she is about to enter that small circle of blessed and accursed creatures which constitutes the only aristocracy which one can consider today with any degree of respect. Happiness in Slaveryby Jean Paulhan of l’Académie Française

• From Story of O (1954)

  During the next few days, O took some fifty photographs of Jacqueline. They were like nothing she had ever taken before. Never, perhaps, had she had such a model. Anyway, never before had she been able to extract such meaning and emotion from a face or body. And yet all she was aiming for was to make the silks, the furs, and the laces more beautiful by that sudden beauty of an elfin creature surprised by her reflection in the mirror, which Jacqueline became in the simplest blouse, as she did in the most elegant mink. She had short, thick, blond hair, only slightly curly, and at the least excuse she would cock her head slightly toward her left shoulder and nestle her cheek against the upturned collar of her fur, if she were wearing fur. O caught her once in this position, tender and smiling, her hair gently blown as though by a soft wind, and her smooth, hard cheekbone snuggled against the gray mink, soft and gray as the freshly fallen ashes of a wood fire. Her lips were slightly parted, and her eyes half-closed. Beneath the gleaming, liquid gloss of the photograph she looked like some blissful girl who had drowned, she was pale, so pale. O had had the picture printed with as little contrast as possible. She had taken another picture of Jacqueline which she found even more stunning: back lighted, it portrayed her bare-shouldered, with her delicate head, and her face as well, enveloped in a large-meshed black veil surmounted by an absurd double aigrette whose impalpable tufts crowned her like wisps of smoke; she was wearing an enormous robe of heavy brocaded silk, red like the dress of a bride in the Middle Ages, which came down to below her ankles, flared at the hips and tight at the waist, and the armature of which traced the outline of her bosom. It was what the dress designers called a gala gown, the kind no one ever wears. The spike-heeled sandals were also of red silk. And all the time Jacqueline was before O dressed in that gown and sandals, and that veil which was like the premonition of a mask, O, in her mind’s eye, was completing, was innerly modifying the model: a trifle here, a trifle there—the waist drawn in a little tighter, the breasts slightly raised—and it was the same dress as at Roissy, the same dress that Jeanne had worn, the same smooth, heavy, cascading silk which one takes by the handful and raises whenever one is told to.… Why yes, Jacqueline was lifting it in just that way as she descended from the platform on which she had been posing for the past fifteen minutes. It was the same rustling, the same crackling of dried leaves. No one wears these gala gowns any longer? But they do. Jacqueline was also wearing a gold choker around her neck, and on her wrists two gold bracelets. O caught herself thinking that she would be more beautiful with a leather collar and leather bracelets. And then she did something she had never done before: she followed Jacqueline into the large dressing room adjacent to the studio, where the models dressed and made up and where they left their clothing and make-up kits after hours. She remained standing, leaning against the doorjamb, her eyes glued to the mirror of the dressing table before which Jacqueline, without removing her gown, had sat down. The mirror was so big—it covered the entire back wall, and the dressing table itself was a simple slab of black glass—that she could see Jacqueline’s and her own reflection, as well as the reflection of the costume girl who was undoing the aigrettes and the tulle netting. Jacqueline removed the choker herself, her bare arms lifted like two handles; a touch of perspiration gleamed in her armpits, which were shaved (Why? O wondered, what a pity, she’s so fair), and O could smell the sharp, delicate, slightly plantlike odor and wondered what perfume Jacqueline ought to wear—what perfume they would make her wear. Then Jacqueline unclasped her bracelets and put them on the glass slab, where they made a momentary clanking sound like the sound of chains. Her hair was so fair that her skin was actually darker than her hair, a grayish beige like fine-grained sand just after the tide has gone out. On the photograph, the red silk would be black. Just then, the thick eyelashes, which Jacqueline was always reluctant to make up, lifted, and in the mirror O met her gaze, a look so direct and steady that, without being able to detach her own eyes from it, she felt herself slowly blushing. That was all.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Beforehand we had lunch in his oak-paneled office. The fare was simple and unvarying—sandwiches of tuna, cold cuts, and cold Chesapeake Bay crab cake, followed by fruit salad and flattened pecan pie—but served with Southern elegance: linen tablecloth, glistening silver trays, bone china. The lunch conversation was long and leisurely. Though each of us had calls to return and patients clamoring for attention, there was no way to rush Dr. Whitehorn, and ultimately even I, the most frenetic of the group, learned to put time on hold. In these two hours we had the opportunity to ask our professor anything: I remember asking him about such matters as the genesis of paranoia, a physician’s responsibility to the suicidal, the incompatibility between therapeutic change and determinism. Though he responded fully, he clearly preferred other subjects: the accuracy of Persian archers, the comparative quality of Greek versus Spanish marble, the major blunders of the battle of Gettysburg, his improved periodic table (he was originally trained as a chemist). After lunch Dr. Whitehorn began interviewing in his office the four or five patients on his service while we silently observed. It was never possible to predict the length of each interview. Some lasted fifteen minutes; many continued for two or three hours. I most clearly remember the summer months, the cool, darkened office, the orange- and green-striped awnings blocking out the fierce Baltimore sun, the awning posts encircled by magnolia climbers whose fleecy blossoms dangled just outside the window. From the corner window I could just spot the edge of the house staff tennis court. Oh, how I ached to play in those days! I fidgeted and daydreamed about aces and volleys as the shadows inexorably lengthened across the court. Only when dusk had swallowed the very last strands of tennis twilight did I relinquish all hope and fully give my attention to Dr. Whitehorn’s interviews. His pace was leisurely. He had plenty of time. Nothing interested him as much as a patient’s occupation and avocation. One week he would be encouraging a South American planter to talk for an hour about coffee trees; the next week it might be a history professor discussing the failure of the Spanish Armada. You would have thought his paramount purpose was to understand the relationship between altitude and the quality of the coffee bean or the sixteenth-century political motives behind the Spanish Armada. So subtly did he shift into more personal domains that I was always surprised when a suspicious, paranoid patient suddenly began to speak frankly about himself and his psychotic world. By allowing the patient to teach him, Dr. Whitehorn related to the person, rather than the pathology, of that patient. His strategy invariably enhanced both the patient’s self-regard and his or her willingness to be self-revealing. A cunning interviewer, one might say—yet “cunning” it was not. There was no duplicity: Dr.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Rob, only twenty-seven, had lived for six months with a highly malignant brain tumor. Lurching in and out of denial, he would insist, at one moment, “You’ll see, I’ll be backpacking in the Alps in six weeks” (I don’t believe poor Rob had ever been east of Nevada), and, a few moments later, curse his paralyzed legs for preventing him from searching for his life insurance policy: “I’ve got to find out whether the benefits to my wife and kids will be canceled if I commit suicide.” Although we knew the group was not large enough, we started with four members—Paula, Sal, Rob, and I. Since Sal and Paula needed no help and I was the therapist, Rob became the group’s raison d’être. But Rob obstinately refused to give us much satisfaction. We tried to offer him comfort and guidance while respecting his choice to deny. Supporting denial, however, is an unsatisfying, duplicitous endeavor, especially when what we wanted was to help Rob accept his dying and get the most out of what life he had left. None of us looked forward to our meetings. After two months Rob’s headaches grew more severe, and one night he died quietly in his sleep. I doubt we were useful to him. Sal greeted death in a very different manner. His spirit expanded as his life drew to a close. His imminent death flooded his life with a meaning he had never previously known. Multiple myeloma, an extraordinarily painful bone-invasive cancer, was Sal’s disease; he had fractured many bones and was encased in a full body cast from neck to thigh. So many people loved Sal that it was hard to believe he was only thirty. Like Paula, he had been, at a time of greatest despair, transformed by the stunning idea that his cancer was his ministry. This revelation determined everything Sal did subsequently in life, even his agreeing to enter the group: he felt it might provide a forum to help others find some transcendent meaning in their illness. Although Sal entered our group six months too early, when it was still too small to give him the audience he deserved, he found other platforms— primarily high schools, where he addressed troubled teenagers. “You want to corrupt your body with drugs? Want to kill it with booze, with grass, with cocaine?” his voice thundered through the auditorium. “You want to smash your body in autos? Kill it? Throw it off the Golden Gate Bridge? You don’t want it? Well, then, give me your body! Let me have it. I need it. I’ll take it—I want to live!” It was an extraordinary appeal. I trembled when I heard him speak.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  It was as if you were improvising on the spot.” “What did that improvising feel like to you?” I asked, scribbling quickly. “Very scary sometimes. I wanted you to be the Oz wizard. I was lost, and I wanted you to know the way home to Kansas. Sometimes I was suspicious of your uncertainty. I wondered if your improvisation was real or whether it was just a pretense at improvisation, just your wizard’s way. “Another thing: you knew how much I insist on figuring out how to fix things for myself. So I thought your improvising with me was a plan—a pretty canny plan—to disarm me. “Another thought . . . you want me to just ramble like this, Irv?” “Exactly like this—keep going.” “When you told me about other widows or about your research findings, I knew you were trying to reassure me, and once in a while it helped to realize that I was in the midst of a process, that I would pass through certain states of mind just as other women had done. But generally that kind of comment left me feeling diminished. It was as though you were making me ordinary. I never felt ordinary when we were improvising. Then I was special, unique. We were finding our way together.” “Other helpful things?” “Again, simple things. You may not even remember, but at the end of one of our very first sessions, as I was walking out the door, you put your hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I’ll see this through with you.’ I never forgot that statement—it was a mighty staff of support.” “I remember, Irene.” “And it helped a lot when sometimes you’d stop trying to fix or to analyze or interpret me and you’d say something simple and straight like, ‘Irene, you’re going through a nightmare—one of the worst I can imagine.’ And the best thing of all was when you’d add—not often enough—that you admired and respected me for my courage in persevering.” Thinking to say something about her courage now, I glanced up and saw her looking at her watch, heard her say, “Oh dear, I’ve got to go.” So she was ending the session. How far the mighty have fallen! For a moment I had an impish impulse to fake a tantrum and accuse her of throwing me out but decided not to be so childish. “I know what you’re thinking, Irv. ” “What’s that?” “You probably find the reversal amusing—that it’s I, not you, ending the session.” “Right on, Irene. As usual.” “You going to be here for a few minutes? I’m meeting Kevin down the street for lunch and can bring him up here to meet you. I’d like to do that.” While waiting for Irene to return with Kevin, I tried to square her account of therapy with my own. According to her, I had helped most of all by engaging her, by shrinking away from nothing she said or did.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Perhaps her cosmic perspective, her detachment from quotidian goals, threatened the underpinnings of my dedication to success in the academic marketplace. Of course, I saw her weekly in the group, where I was the titular leader and Paula—what was she?—not a cotherapist but something else—a coordinator, or cofacilitator, or liaison. She oriented new members to the group, made certain they were welcomed, shared her personal experiences, phoned all members during the week, took them out to lunch, and was available to anyone in crisis. Perhaps “spiritual consultant” is the best way to describe Paula’s role. She elevated and deepened the group. Whenever she talked, I listened attentively: Paula always had unexpected insights. She taught the members how to meditate, how to reach deep within themselves, how to find a center of tranquillity, how to contain pain. One day, as a meeting was about to close, she surprised me by taking a candle out of her bag, lighting it, and setting it on the floor. “Let’s move closer together,” she said, stretching our her hands to the member on either side of her. “Look at the candle and meditate for a few moments in silence.” Before I met Paula, I was so deeply ensconced in the medical tradition that I would not have had charitable thoughts about a therapist who ended group sessions with the members holding hands and staring silently at a candle. Yet Paula’s suggestion felt so right to the members, and to me, that we began to end each meeting in that fashion. I came to treasure those closing moments and, if I happened to be sitting next to Paula, would give her hand a warm squeeze before I relinquished it. She generally led the meditation aloud, improvising, always with great dignity. I loved her meditations, and to the end of my life, I will hear her quietly instructing us: “Let go, let go of anger, let go of pain, let go of self-pity. Reach into your center, into your quiet, peaceful depths, and open yourself up to love, to forgiveness, to God.” Heady stuff for an uptight, free-thinking, medically trained empiricist! Sometimes I wondered whether Paula had any needs beyond the need to help others. Though I often asked her what the group could do for her, I never got an answer. Sometimes I wondered about her busy pace—she visited several sick patients every day. What drives her? I asked myself, and why does she present her problems only in the past tense? She offers us only her solutions, never her unsolved problems. But I never wondered too long. After all, Paula did have advanced metastatic cancer and had outlived even the most optimistic statistics. She was energetic, widely loved, widely loving, an inspiration to everyone forced to live with cancer.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  As a European, I have always admired Americans’ optimism. It is the opposite of the fatalism and resignation that pervade so many other, more traditional cultures, and it expresses a healthy sense of entitlement. People here don’t like to say, “That’s just the way it is; you can’t change it.” But this can-do attitude encourages us to assume that dwindling desire is an operational problem that can be fixed. From magazine articles to self-help books, we are encouraged to view a lack of sex in our relationships as a scheduling issue that demands better prioritizing and time management, or as a consequence of poor communication. If the problem is testosterone deficiency, we can get a prescription—an excellent technical solution. For the sexual malaise that can’t be so easily medicalized, remedies abound: books, videos, and sexual accoutrements are there to assist you not only with the basics, but to bring you to unimagined levels of ecstasy. In her book Against Love, Laura Kipnis writes: Whole new sectors of the economy have been spawned, an array of ancillary industries and markets fostered, and massive social investments in new technologies undertaken, from Viagra to couples porn: late-capitalism’s Lourdes for dying marriages. Like dedicated doctors keeping corpses breathing with shiny heart-lung machines and artificial organs, couples too, armed with their newfangled technologies, can now beat back passion’s death. This pragmatic approach typifies how the great country of manifest destiny goes about solving problems. You break the problem down to its component parts, study each one, and come up with a step-by-step plan that you can work on, a solution that promises calculable results. Apply this to sexual problems, though, and you get a model that focuses more on sexual functioning than on sexual feeling. The sex therapist Leonore Tiefer cautions us that in this paradigm, the body is divvied into a collection of unrelated parts, and satisfaction is seen as a result of their perfect functioning. This emphasis on physical achievement rather than desire and pleasure goes hand in hand with an emphasis on genitals, and reinforces the dominant male orientation. The penis is the new patient, having replaced its human owner, and the ability to achieve and maintain a steely erection overshadows any other kind of sexual proficiency. With Viagra, sex is too easily reduced to erections. (And the search is on for a female Viagra—good news for all the helpful husbands currently trading housework for sex, but bad news for the wives who see their own lack of desire as having more to do with romance than with tumescence.) The subjective experience of sexual pleasure is replaced by an objective list of criteria that is easily indexed but woefully truncated: erection, intercourse, orgasm.