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 History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The whole theological energy of the ante-Nicene period concentrated itself, therefore, upon the doctrine of Christ as the God-man and Redeemer of the world. This doctrine was the kernel of all the baptismal creeds, and was stamped upon the entire life, constitution and worship of the early church. It was not only expressly asserted by the fathers against heretics, but also professed in the daily and weekly worship, in the celebration of baptism, the eucharist and the annual festivals, especially Easter. It was embodied in prayers, doxologies and hymns of praise. From the earliest record Christ was the object not of admiration which is given to finite persons and things, and presupposes equality, but of prayer, praise and adoration which is due only to an infinite, uncreated, divine being. This is evident from several passages of the New Testament,979 from the favorite symbol of the early Christians, the Ichthys,980 from the Tersanctus, the Gloria in Excelsis, the hymn of Clement of Alexandria in praise of the Logos,981 from the testimony of Origen, who says: "We sing hymns to the Most High alone, and His Only Begotten, who is the Word and God; and we praise God and His Only Begotten;"982 and from the heathen testimony of the younger Pliny who reports to the Emperor Trajan that the Christians in Asia were in the habit of singing "hymns to Christ as their God."983 Eusebius, quoting from an earlier writer (probably Hippolytus) against the heresy of Artemon, refers to the testimonies of Justin, Miltiades, Tatian, Clement, and "many others" for the divinity of Christ, and asks: "Who knows not the works of Irenaeus and Melito, and the rest, in which Christ is announced as God and man? Whatever psalms and hymns of the brethren were written by the faithful from the beginning, celebrate Christ as the Word of God, by asserting his divinity."984 The same faith was sealed by the sufferings and death of "the noble army" of confessors and martyrs, who confessed Christ to be God, and died for Christ as God.985 Life and worship anticipated theology, and Christian experience contained more than divines could in clear words express. So a child may worship the Saviour and pray to Him long before he can give a rational account of his faith. The instinct of the Christian people was always in the right direction, and it is unfair to make them responsible for the speculative crudities, the experimental and tentative statements of some of the ante-Nicene teachers. The divinity of Christ then, and with this the divinity of the Holy Spirit, were from the first immovably fixed in the mind and heart of the Christian Church as a central article of faith.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In the summer of 1531, after a visit to Noyon, where he attended his father in his last sickness, Calvin removed a second time to Paris, accompanied by his younger brother, Antoine. He found there several of his fellow-students of Orleans and Bourges; one of them offered him the home of his parents, but he declined, and took up his abode in the College Fortet, where we find him again in 1533. A part of the year he spent in Orleans. Left master of his fortune, he now turned his attention again chiefly to classical studies. He attended the lectures of Pierre Danès, a Hellenist and encyclopaedic scholar of great reputation.406 He showed as yet no trace of opposition to the Catholic Church. His correspondence refers to matters of friendship and business, but avoids religious questions. When Daniel asked him to introduce his sister to the superior of a nunnery in Paris which she wished to enter, he complied with the request, and made no effort to change her purpose. He only admonished her not to confide in her own strength, but to put her whole trust in God. This shows, at least, that he had lost faith in the meritoriousness of vows and good works, and was approaching the heart of the evangelical system.407 He associated much with a rich and worthy merchant, Estienne de la Forge, who afterwards was burned for the sake of the Gospel (1535). He seems to have occasionally suffered in Paris of pecuniary embarrassment. The income from his benefices was irregular, and he had to pay for the printing of his first book. At the close of 1531 he borrowed two crowns from his friend, Duchemin. He expressed a hope soon to discharge his debt, but would none the less remain a debtor in gratitude for the services of friendship. It is worthy of remark that even those of his friends who refused to follow him in his religious change, remained true to him. This is an effective refutation of the charge of coldness so often made against him. François Daniel of Orleans renewed the correspondence in 1559, and entrusted to him the education of his son Pierre, who afterwards became an advocate and bailiff of Saint-Benoit near Orleans.408 § 71. Calvin as a Humanist. Commentary on Seneca. "L. Annei Se | necae, Romani Senato | ris, ac philosophi clarissi | mi, libri duo de Clementia, ad Ne | ronem Caesarem: | Joannis Caluini Nouiodunaei commentariis illustrati ... | Parisiis ... 1532." 4°). Reprinted 1576, 1597, 1612, and, from the ed. princeps, in Opera, vol. V. (1866) pp. 5–162. The commentary is preceded by a dedicatory epistle, a sketch of the life of Seneca. H. Lecoultre: Calvin d’après son commentaire sur le "De Clementia" de Sénèque (1532). Lausanne, 1891 (pp. 29).

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  She invited many of us from the group to her graduation dinner, including Mildred. As ever, Mildred brought herself to the event in her late-model car and, naturally, at the end of the evening prepared to take herself home. It was winter and therefore dark and cold and, as is so often the case in Vancouver in the winter, it was raining as though there was an ark that needed launching. One of Karen’s friends, an airline pilot with a mildly chivalrous nature, asked Mildred if she would like him to take her arm and walk her to her car. She turned and gave him a withering glance. “Good Lord,” she said. “What for?” And with that she unfurled her umbrella and marched out into the night. Mildred was unlike any seventy-something person I had ever met. She was fiercely independent and had never been married, something quite unusual for someone of her generation. She owned a delightful bungalow in West Vancouver, with a fabulous view of Lions Gate Bridge and English Bay that she’d inherited from her parents yonks ago. The backyard was huge and gorgeous and when the seasons permitted she spent her waking hours out there gardening and being a friend to every bird and bee and cat that came along. She was in far better physical shape than anyone else in the group, yet we were all on average thirty-five years younger than she was. (She took us hiking once on the North Shore mountains, and chose a relatively easy hike for our benefit. Still, she had to slow down during the ascent because none of us could keep up with her.) She was like a combination of the Dalai Lama and Tina Turner; her compassion and moral strength were like a beacon but she could take care of herself in any situation without flinching and would kick your ass if you tested her. Limori used to comment that Mildred’s role in God’s plan was simply to bring good energy into our midst. Limori said that Mildred had done enough personal work in her life that she was clear and therefore needed no further work done on her, unlike the rest of us. Mildred had been coming to the group for years, and yet Limori had never, not once, confronted her about any of her ego positions or workshopped her in any way. She was the only person for whom this was true. Everyone else who crossed Limori’s path, from waitresses in restaurants to her husband(s), were treated like bugs under a microscope. Except Mildred. I’ve often wondered why Limori treated Mildred so differently. At the time, I explained it to myself in the energetic terms I had been trained to apply to any situation. But, looking back, I have a different answer. Limori’s relationship with Mildred was the same as her relationship with anyone who followed her: she gauged carefully and continuously how much she could turn up the heat underneath each of us.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  To Simplicianus then I went, the father of Ambrose (a Bishop now) in receiving Thy grace, and whom Ambrose truly loved as a father. To him I related the mazes of my wanderings. But when I mentioned that I had read certain books of the Platonists, which Victorinus, sometime Rhetoric Professor of Rome (who had died a Christian, as I had heard), had translated into Latin, he testified his joy that I had not fallen upon the writings of other philosophers, full of fallacies and deceits, after the rudiments of this world, whereas the Platonists many ways led to the belief in God and His Word. Then to exhort me to the humility of Christ, hidden from the wise, and revealed to little ones, he spoke of Victorinus himself, whom while at Rome he had most intimately known: and of him he related what I will not conceal. For it contains great praise of Thy grace, to be confessed unto Thee, how that aged man, most learned and skilled in the liberal sciences, and who had read, and weighed so many works of the philosophers; the instructor of so many noble Senators, who also, as a monument of his excellent discharge of his office, had (which men of this world esteem a high honour) both deserved and obtained a statue in the Roman Forum; he, to that age a worshipper of idols, and a partaker of the sacrilegious rites, to which almost all the nobility of Rome were given up, and had inspired the people with the love of Anubis, barking Deity, and all The monster Gods of every kind, who fought ’Gainst Neptune, Venus, and Minerva: whom Rome once conquered, now adored, all which the aged Victorinus had with thundering eloquence so many years defended;—he now blushed not to be the child of Thy Christ, and the new-born babe of Thy fountain; submitting his neck to the yoke of humility, and subduing his forehead to the reproach of the Cross.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  Is not this corporeal figure apparent to all whose senses are perfect? why then speaks it not the same to all? Animals small and great see it, but they cannot ask it: because no reason is set over their senses to judge on what they report. But men can ask, so that the invisible things of God are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; but by love of them, they are made subject unto them: and subjects cannot judge. Nor yet do the creatures answer such as ask, unless they can judge; nor yet do they change their voice (i.e., their appearance), if one man only sees, another seeing asks, so as to appear one way to this man, another way to that, but appearing the same way to both, it is dumb to this, speaks to that; yea rather it speaks to all; but they only understand, who compare its voice received from without, with the truth within. For truth saith unto me, “Neither heaven, nor earth, nor any other body is thy God.” This, their very nature saith to him that seeth them: “They are a mass; a mass is less in a part thereof than in the whole.” Now to thee I speak, O my soul, thou art my better part: for thou quickenest the mass of my body, giving it life, which no body can give to a body: but thy God is even unto thee the Life of thy life. What then do I love, when I love my God? who is He above the head of my soul? By my very soul will I ascend to Him. I will pass beyond that power whereby I am united to my body, and fill its whole frame with life. Nor can I by that power find my God; for so horse and mule that have no understanding might find Him; seeing it is the same power, whereby even their bodies live. But another power there is, not that only whereby I animate, but that too whereby I imbue with sense my flesh, which the Lord hath framed for me: commanding the eye not to hear, and the ear not to see; but the eye, that through it I should see, and the ear, that through it I should hear; and to the other senses severally, what is to each their own peculiar seats and offices; which, being divers, I the one mind, do through them enact. I will pass beyond this power of mine also; for this also have the horse, and mule, for they also perceive through the body.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Calvin could not have done the work of Farel; for he was not a missionary, or a popular preacher. Still less could Farel have done the work of Calvin; for he was neither a theologian, nor a statesman. Calvin, the Frenchman, would have been as much out of place in Zürich or Wittenberg, as the Swiss Zwingli and the German Luther would have been out of place and without a popular constituency in French-speaking Geneva. Each stands first and unrivalled in his particular mission and field of labor. Luther’s public career as a reformer embraced twenty-nine years, from 1517 to 1546; that of Zwingli, only twelve years, from 1519 to 1531 (unless we date it from his preaching at Einsiedeln in 1516); that of Calvin, twenty-eight years, from 1536 to 1564. The first reached an age of sixty-two: the second, of forty-seven; the third, of fifty-four. Calvin was twenty-five years younger than Luther and Zwingli, and had the great advantage of building on their foundation. He had less genius, but more talent. He was inferior to them as a man of action, but superior as a thinker and organizer. They cut the stones in the quarries, he polished them in the workshop. They produced the new ideas, he constructed them into a system. His was the work of Apollos rather than of Paul: to water rather than to plant, God giving the increase. Calvin’s character is less attractive, and his life less dramatic than Luther’s or Zwingli’s, but he left his Church in a much better condition. He lacked the genial element of humor and pleasantry; he was a Christian stoic: stern, severe, unbending, yet with fires of passion and affection glowing beneath the marble surface. His name will never rouse popular enthusiasm, as Luther’s and Zwingli’s did at the celebration of the fourth centennial of their birth; no statues of marble or bronze have been erected to his memory; even the spot of his grave in the cemetery at Geneva is unknown.358 But he surpassed them in consistency and self-discipline, and by his exegetical, doctrinal, and polemical writings, he has exerted and still exerts more influence than any other Reformer upon the Protestant Churches of the Latin and Anglo-Saxon races. He made little Geneva for a hundred years the Protestant Rome and the best-disciplined Church in Christendom. History furnishes no more striking example of a man of so little personal popularity, and yet such great influence upon the people; of such natural timidity and bashfulness combined with such strength of intellect and character, and such control over his and future generations. He was by nature and taste a retiring scholar, but Providence made him an organizer and ruler of churches.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  An admirable discipline prevailed in the camp of Zürich, that reminds one of the Puritan army of Cromwell. Zwingli or one of his colleagues preached daily; prayers were offered before each meal; psalms, hymns, and national songs resounded in the tents; no oath was heard; gambling and swearing were prohibited, and disreputable women excluded; the only exercises were wrestling, casting stones, and military drill. There can be little doubt that if the Zürichers had made a timely attack upon the Catholics and carried out the plan of Zwingli, they would have gained a complete victory and dictated the terms of peace. How long the peace would have lasted is a different question; for behind the Forest Cantons stood Austria, which might at any time have changed the situation. But counsels of peace prevailed. Bern was opposed to the offensive, and declared that if the Zürichers began the attack, they should be left to finish it alone. The Zürichers themselves were divided, and their military leaders (Berger and Escher) inclined to peace. The Catholics, being assured that they need not fear an attack from Bern, mustered courage and were enforced by troops from Wallis and the Italian bailiwicks. They now numbered nearly twelve thousand armed men. The hostile armies faced each other from Cappel and Baar, but hesitated to advance. Catholic guards would cross over the border to be taken prisoners by the Zürichers, who had an abundance of provision, and sent them back well fed and clothed. Or they would place a large bucket of milk on the border line and asked the Zürichers for bread, who supplied them richly; whereupon both parties peacefully enjoyed a common meal, and when one took a morsel on the enemy’s side, he was reminded not to cross the frontier. The soldiers remembered that they were Swiss confederates, and that many of them had fought side by side on foreign battlefields.263 "We shall not fight," they said;, and pray God that the storm may pass away without doing us any harm." Jacob Sturm, the burgomaster of Strassburg, who was present as a mediator, was struck with the manifestation of personal harmony and friendship in the midst of organized hostility. "You are a singular people," he said; "though disunited, you are united." § 43. The First Peace of Cappel. June, 1529. After several negotiations, a treaty of Peace was concluded June 25, 1529, between Zürich, Bern, Basel, St. Gall, and the cities of Mühlhausen and Biel on the one hand, and the five Catholic Cantons on the other. The deputies of Glarus, Solothurn, Schaffhausen, Appenzell, Graubünden, Sargans, Strassburg, and Constanz acted as mediators. The treaty was not all that Zwingli desired, especially as regards the abolition of the pensions and the punishment of the dispensers of pensions (wherein he was not supported by Bern), but upon the whole it was favorable to the cause of the Reformation.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  "We boast of our common schools; Calvin was the father of popular education, the inventor of the system of free schools. We are proud of the free States that fringe the Atlantic. The pilgrims of Plymouth were Calvinists; the best influence in South Carolina came from the Calvinists of France. William Penn was the disciple of the Huguenots; the ships from Holland that first brought colonists to Manhattan were filled with Calvinists. He that will not honor the memory, and respect the influence of Calvin, knows but little of the origin of American liberty. "If personal considerations chiefly win applause, then, no one merits our sympathy and our admiration more than Calvin; the young exile from France, who achieved an immortality of fame before he was twenty-eight years of age; now boldly reasoning with the king of France for religious liberty; now venturing as the apostle of truth to carry the new doctrines into the heart of Italy, and hardly escaping from the fury of papal persecution; the purest writer, the keenest dialectician of his century; pushing free inquiry to its utmost verge, and yet valuing inquiry solely as the means of arriving at fixed conclusions. The light of his genius scattered the mask of darkness which superstition had held for centuries before the brow of religion. His probity was unquestioned, his morals spotless. His only happiness consisted in his ’task of glory and of good;’ for sorrow found its way into all his private relations. He was an exile from his country; he became for a season an exile from his place of exile. As a husband he was doomed to mourn the premature loss of his wife; as a father he felt the bitter pang of burying his only child. Alone in the world, alone in a strange land, he went forward in his career with serene resignation and inflexible firmness; no love of ease turned him aside from his vigils; no fear of danger relaxed the nerve of his eloquence; no bodily infirmities checked the incredible activity of his mind; and so he continued, year after year, solitary and feeble, yet toiling for humanity, till after a life of glory, he bequeathed to his personal heirs, a fortune, in books and furniture, stocks and money, not exceeding two hundred dollars, and to the world, a purer reformation, a republican spirit in religion, with the kindred principles of republican liberty." CHAPTER XIV.CALVIN’S THEOLOGY.§ 111. Calvin’s Commentaries.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  This great gift also thou bestowedst, O my God, my mercy, upon that good handmaid of Thine, in whose womb Thou createdst me, that between any disagreeing and discordant parties where she was able, she showed herself such a peacemaker, that hearing on both sides most bitter things, such as swelling and indigested choler uses to break out into, when the crudities of enmities are breathed out in sour discourses to a present friend against an absent enemy, she never would disclose aught of the one unto the other, but what might tend to their reconcilement. A small good this might appear to me, did I not to my grief know numberless persons, who through some horrible and wide-spreading contagion of sin, not only disclose to persons mutually angered things said in anger, but add withal things never spoken, whereas to humane humanity, it ought to seem a light thing not to toment or increase ill will by ill words, unless one study withal by good words to quench it. Such was she, Thyself, her most inward Instructor, teaching her in the school of the heart. Finally, her own husband, towards the very end of his earthly life, did she gain unto Thee; nor had she to complain of that in him as a believer, which before he was a believer she had borne from him. She was also the servant of Thy servants; whosoever of them knew her, did in her much praise and honour and love Thee; for that through the witness of the fruits of a holy conversation they perceived Thy presence in her heart. For she had been the wife of one man, had requited her parents, had govemed her house piously, was well reported of for good works, had brought up children, so often travailing in birth of them, as she saw them swerving from Thee. Lastly, of all of us Thy servants, O Lord (whom on occasion of Thy own gift Thou sufferest to speak), us, who before her sleeping in Thee lived united together, having received the grace of Thy baptism, did she so take care of, as though she had been mother of us all; so served us, as though she had been child to us all.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Charlotte had also stayed in Oxford, but was not doing graduate work. She had begun to write seriously and now lived in a tiny room in the Iffley Road, and to pay the rent was working as a clerk in the local tax office. There was just enough space for a bed and a desk. When we sat there together, drinking coffee or a bottle of cheap wine, I felt full of admiration. I could not imagine how anybody had the courage to be a writer, but undeterred by her grim surroundings, Charlotte was steadily amassing a pile of typewritten sheets. Yet in some ways Charlotte seemed as ill equipped for the world as I. She too seemed to be imprisoned in her own Shalott. She was in love, and Mike, whom none of us was allowed to meet, dropped in on her sporadically whenever it suited him. Charlotte could never go to visit him or even call him, because she was not permitted to know his address or telephone number. Meanwhile, Mike roamed the countryside in his van, eschewing the trap of security and a regular job. It seemed imperative to his masculinity that he retain the initiative in his dealings with Charlotte. I had scarcely heard of feminism, but I found it quite outrageous that brave, talented Charlotte should live as a virtual prisoner because this useless drifter needed to be “free.” She was reluctant to leave her room in case Mike deigned to drop by while she was out, so she could never come and visit me at the Harts’ and we could never meet in a pub or some more cheerful venue. Whenever Charlotte jumped up at the sound of the communal phone or because a car door slammed in the street below, I vowed that if I ever fell in love, I would never allow myself to be so enslaved.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  In this one realm, that of “rough sex”—including sadomasochism, bondage and discipline, and slave-master relationships—people seem to have been able to create the texture of sexual fantasy in real life. Many people who practice rough sex are happy to admit the inevitably therapeutic nature of their discipline. They talk, sometimes rather glibly and sometimes with great seriousness, of how community and family evolve in this world, how communication and a sense of belonging increase with the strokes of the lash. The degree of negotiation and the amount of talking necessary is high. In this kind of sex, sex acts themselves sometimes play a relatively minor part, as the defendant argued before the Supreme Court. If you don’t respond to boot-licking sexually, how can you call it unacceptable sex? And if you do, why would you forbid it? A sense of humor is useful, because this sex, however serious, is play. Making a fantasy real requires a lot of effort, and rough sex is replete with laundry-listing, detail-oriented planning, tools, complicated games, rules, and toys. “[B&D] constantly tests your creativity and ingenuity,” says a prostitute who specializes as a dominatrix. “A hardware store will never look the same to you again.” I can look at rough-trade sex only from the outside, from reading, listening, looking. But I’ve read and looked at it so much because S/M and its cousins are hypnotic to me—they represent a conscious creation of sex wholly unlike the evasive stumbling that sex so often resembles in this country and so often has resembled in my own past. Rough sex is deliberate; its participants architects rather than pawns of their desires. The questions rough sex raises are just the questions we all ask about sex and relationships and ourselves—what goes, what doesn’t. Yet for all I am drawn to that world and take it seriously, I find it almost impossible to describe without making its participants sound faintly ridiculous. How can I describe or elucidate the fantasy of infantilism, or the dialogue between sexual master and sexual slave, without making everyone involved seem like lunatics? But that’s as much sex itself and the world removed in which it exists than this particular brand of sex—I can’t even repeat the common phrases of heterosexual intercourse without laughing. These things, all sexual things, take place in another space and time, outside intellect, outside judgment; they can be understood, and reviewed, only there. As with all things sexual, details make all the difference. One is never simply whipped, or spanked, one must be scourged in quite specific ways. Just as I might say, “Here, dear, not there,” another person might say, “The birch cane, today, dear, not the leather strap.” Because the birch cane is different, full of different sensations, different connotations, different meaning.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I was also intrigued by the role of study in the religious life of Jews. As a woman, I could not visit the Orthodox yeshivas in Jerusalem where Jews studied Torah and Talmud, but Joel had some film of these noisy, lively sessions, which we were going to use in our series. I watched the men bent over the scrolls, swaying rhythmically in prayer, as they spoke the sacred words aloud and argued passionately with one another. Those gospel scenes suddenly sprang into new life. Those “scribes and Pharisees” excoriated by the evangelists were not simply trying to trap Jesus when they questioned him about the greatest commandment of the Torah, about what Moses would say about paying tribute to the Romans, or about Sabbath observance. They were like these modern Jews in the yeshivas. This argumentation was a form of worship. Certainly the rabbis who compiled the Talmud, some of whom were Jesus’ contemporaries, insisted over and over again that “when two or three study the Torah together, the Divine Presence is in their midst”—words that were strangely echoed in one of Jesus’ own maxims. Study of the Law was not a barren, cerebral exercise. It brought Jews into the presence of God. I might have liked that, I reflected as I watched those films. Studying in that intense way might have suited me a great deal better than Ignatian meditation. It seemed suddenly shameful to me that I had grown up in such ignorance of Judaism, the parent faith of Christianity. The more I read about first-century Judaism, the more intensely Jewish Jesus appeared; and even Saint Paul, who was such a rebel, was really arguing about a New Israel, a fresh way of being Jewish in the modern world of his day. I knew that because of this project, I would never again be able to think about Christianity as a separate religion. I would have to develop a form of double vision. Increasingly, Judaism and Christianity seemed to be one faith tradition which had gone in two different directions.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 3MANY TEMPS DON’T LIKE DOING TAPES; I DO. NATURALLY I like transcribing some tapes better than others. In the early eighties I worked in the office of the head of a big company—well, why should I suppress the name?—in the office of Andrew Fleury, the head of Noptica. He had a three-person WP staff who did nothing but type his gigantic output of correspondence, speeches, interviews, Q-and-A sessions at stockholder meetings, and so on. I think he must have had political ambitions even then. I worked there several times. One long tape of his that I did included a letter ordering a case of some rare sort of Armagnac from a local liquor wholesaler. (It was a personal letter, let me say.) I didn’t know what Armagnac was, and, guessing, I typed Armaniac. Discovering this, Fleury flew into a rage. I heard him laying into one of the two co-office managers—“Paula, tell me what is wrong with this paragraph!” The letter was returned to me with the following marginal scholium: “An alcoholic beverage, not a crazy Armenian!! Don’t guess, look it up!!” Well, maybe he was right—I should have looked it up. But once Fleury caught the error, he could have at least passed on the fact that the word had a g in it. I lost five minutes flipping around in a dictionary. Most of the time, though, salaried people expect so little from temps that any slight awareness of a letter or memo’s context or intent fills them with joy, and they are as a result very easy to work for. But why is it that I so like typing tapes? I’ve seen word-processing operators throw their headsets down after several hours of transcribing, shouting, “I hate doing this!” Yet I even liked typing Fleury’s tapes. For one thing, I like that I’m fairly good at it—I can, for instance, often engage in a little parallel processing, typing the sentence that just passed while listening to and storing the phrase that I’m currently hearing: I enjoy seeing how long I can go without resorting to the rewind half of the foot-pedal. But mainly I prefer doing tapes to typing handwritten documents simply because you can hear the dictator thinking. You can hear him groping for the conventional formula that will cover a slightly unusual case. You can occasionally hear undertones of irritation or affection. It is a great privilege to be present when a person slowly puts his thoughts into words, phrase by phrase, doing the best he can. Because you are traveling right along with him as he forms his sentences, making each word he says appear as a little clump of letters on your screen, you begin to feel as if you are doing the thinking yourself; you occupy some dark space in the interior of his mind as he goes about his job.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Eric’s coming home.” “Who’s Eric?” Ida asked. “Eric Jones,” Cass said. “He’s an actor friend of ours who’s been living in France for the last couple of years. But he’s been signed to do a play on Broadway this fall.” Vivaldo read. Lee Bronson has signed Eric Jones, who last appeared locally three seasons ago in the short-lived Kingdom of the Blind, for the role of the elder son in the Lane Smith drama, Happy Hunting Ground, which opens here in November. “Son of a bitch,” said Vivaldo, looking very pleased. He turned to Cass. “Have you heard from him?” “Oh, no,” said Cass, “not for a very long time.” “It’ll be nice to see him again,” Vivaldo said. He looked at Ida. “You’ll like him. Rufus knew him, we were all very good friends.” He folded the paper and dropped it on the bar. “Everybody’s famous, goddamnit, except me.” Richard came into the room, looking harried and boyish, wearing an old gray sweater over a white T-shirt and carrying his belt in his hands. “It’s easy to see what you’ve been doing,” said Vivaldo, smiling. “We heard it all the way in here.” Richard looked at the belt shamefacedly and threw it on the sofa. “I didn’t really use it on him. I just made believe I was going to. I probably should have whaled the daylights out of him.” He said to Cass, “What’s the matter with him all of a sudden? He’s never acted like this before.” “I’ve already told you what I think it is. It’s the new house and kind of new excitement, and he doesn’t see as much of you as he’s used to, and he’s reacted to all of this very badly. He’ll get over it, but it’s going to take a little time.” “Paul’s not like that. Hell, he’s gone out and made friends already. He’s having a ball.” “Richard, Paul and Michael are not at all alike.” He stared at her and shook his head. “That’s true. Sorry.” He turned to Ida and Vivaldo. “Excuse us. We’re fascinated by our offspring. We sometimes sit around and talk about them for hours. Ida, you look wonderful, it’s great to see you.” He took her hand in his, looking into her eyes. “Are you all right?” “I’m fine, Richard. And it’s wonderful to see you. Especially now that you’re such a success.” “Ah, you mustn’t listen to my wife,” he said. He went behind the bar. “Everybody’s got a drink except me, I guess. And I”—he looked very boyish, very secure and happy—“am going to have a dry martini on the rocks.” He opened the ice bucket. “Only, there aren’t any rocks.” “I’ll get you some ice,” Cass said. She put her drink on the bar and picked up the ice bucket. “You know, I think we’re going to have to buy some ice from the delicatessen.” “Well, I’ll go down and do that later, chicken.”

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company. 64 B. J u s t i n i a n l e a p s f r om the first century C.E. to the time of Charlemagne (d. 814). Justinian’s era is the bridge here. Charlemagne is part of the Roman story. C. T h e n e x t j u m p i s f r o m C h a r l e m a g n e t o t h e p a r t i s a n p o l i t i c s o f Guelf and Ghibelline in Dante’s present. VI. J u s t i n i a n e n d s h i s d i s c o u r s e b y singing the praises of one of his companions in the circle of Mercury, Romeo of Villeneuve (d. 1250), “this little star.” A. R o m e o w a s a s t a t e s m a n a n d p r i m e minister for a Provençal count. B. H i s g o o d w o r k f o r h i s l o r d w a s r e w a r d e d w i t h e x i l e . C. J u s t i n i a n s a y s t h a t R o m e o a c c e p t e d h i s e x i l e a n d b e c a m e a p i l g r i m . VII. R o m e o ’ s s t o r y e c h o e s t h e s t o r y of Pier delle Vigne in Inferno 13. A. I n t h a t c a n t o , P i e r g l o r i f i e d h i s e m p e r o r , F r e d e r i c k I I . B. H e r e , i n h e a v e n , a n e m p e r o r g l o r i f i e s a m i n i s t e r . C. I n I n f e r n o 1 3 , P i e r r e s p o n d s t o h i s e x i l e b y s u i c i d e . D. H e r e , R o m e o r e s p o n d s w i t h g r a c e a n d h u m i l i t y . E.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This was becoming my own experience. I was writing about the three Abrahamic faiths, but could not see any one of them as superior to any of the others. Indeed, I was constantly struck by their profound similarity. I was equally delighted by the insights of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers: none of them had a monopoly of truth. Working in isolation from one another, and often in a state of deadly hostility, they had come up with remarkably similar conclusions. This unanimity seemed to suggest that they were onto something real about the human condition. At quite an early stage in my research, I was fortunate to come across a phrase that sprang out at me from a footnote in Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s magisterial work The Venture of Islam. It seemed to sum up my experience during the last year and showed me how a religious historian should proceed. I immediately copied out the passage and pinned it to the notice board beside my desk. I tried to read it every day, especially when I felt weary or jaded with the effort of penetrating minds that sometimes seemed light-years from my own circumstances. Hodgson is discussing the esoteric tradition in Islam, and cautions his readers not to approach it patronizingly, from a position of enlightened rationality. He cites what the eminent Islamist Louis Massignon had called the psychosociological “science of compassion”: The scholarly observer must render the mental and practical behavior of a group into terms available in his own mental resources, which should remain personally felt, even while informed with a breadth of reference which will allow other educated persons to make sense of them. But this must not be to substitute his own and his readers’ conventions for the original, but to broaden his own perspective so that it can make a place for the other. Concretely, he must never be satisfied to cease asking “but why?” until he has driven his understanding to the point where he has an immediate, human grasp of what a given position meant, such that every nuance in the data is accounted for and withal, given the total of presuppositions and circumstances, he could feel himself doing the same.5 Compassion does not, of course, mean to feel pity or to condescend, but to feel with. This was the method I had found to be essential while writing Muhammad. It demanded what Saint Paul had called a kenosis, an emptying of self that would lead to enlargement and an enhanced perspective. And I liked Hodgson’s emphasis on the importance of feeling and emotion. It was not enough to understand other people’s beliefs, rituals, and ethical practices intellectually. You had to feel them too and make an imaginative, though disciplined, identification.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  To learn more, I consulted Biola’s doctrinal statement online, and there discovered that Biola actually disallows all sex outside of “biblical marriage,” here defined as “a faithful, heterosexual union between one genetic male and one genetic female.” (I was impressed by the “genetic”—très au courant!) Elsewhere on the web I learned that there is, or was, a student group called the Biola Queer Underground that emerged a few years ago to protest the antigay policies of the college, mainly via the web and anonymous postering campaigns on campus. The group’s name seemed promising, but my excitement dimmed upon reading the FAQ on their web page: Q: What is The Biola Underground’s stance on homosexuality? A: Surprisingly, some people have been unclear as to what we think about being both LGBTQ and Christian. To clear up this issue, we are in favor of celebrating homosexual behavior in its proper context: marriage…. We hold to the already stated standards of Biola that premarital sex is sinful and outside of God’s plan for humans and we believe that this standard also applies to homosexuals and other members of the LGBTQ community. What kind of “queer” is this? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wanted to make way for “queer” to hold all kinds of resistances and fracturings and mismatches that have little or nothing to do with sexual orientation. “Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant” she wrote. “Keenly, it is relational, and strange.” She wanted the term to be a perpetual excitement, a kind of placeholder—a nominative, like Argo, willing to designate molten or shifting parts, a means of asserting while also giving the slip. That is what reclaimed terms do—they retain, they insist on retaining, a sense of the fugitive. At the same time, Sedgwick argued that “given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term [queer]’s definitional center, would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself.” In other words, she wanted it both ways. There is much to be learned from wanting something both ways.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Be careful.” “I know. They really are getting behind the book, though; they have great hopes for it. You haven’t seen it yet, have you?” She walked over to the sofa, where books and papers were scattered and picked the book up, thoughtfully. She crossed the room again. “Here it is.” She put the book down on the bar between Ida and Vivaldo. “It’s had great advance notices. You know, ‘literate,’ ‘adult,’ ‘thrilling’—that sort of thing. Richard’ll show them to you. It’s even been compared to Crime and Punishment —because they both have such a simple story line, I guess.” Vivaldo looked at her sharply. “Well. I’m only quoting.” The sun broke free of a passing cloud and filled the room. They squinted down at the book on the bar. Cass stood quietly behind them. The book jacket was very simple, jagged red letters on a dark blue ground: The Strangled Men. A novel of murder, by Richard Silenski . He looked at the jacket flap which described the story and then turned the book over to find himself looking into Richard’s open, good-natured face. The paragraph beneath the picture summed up Richard’s life, from his birth to the present: Mr. Silenski is married and is the father of two sons, Paul (II) and Michael (8). He makes his home in New York City . He put the book down. Ida picked it up. “It’s wonderful,” he said to Cass. “You must be proud.” He took her face between his hands and kissed her on the forehead. He picked up his drink. “There’s always something wonderful about a book, you know?—when it’s really, all of a sudden, a book, and it’s there between covers. And there’s your name on it. It must be a great feeling.” “Yes,” said Cass. “You’ll know that feeling soon,” said Ida. She was examining the book intently. She looked up with a grin. “I bet I just found out something you never knew,” she said to Vivaldo. “Impossible,” said Vivaldo. “I’m sure I know everything Richard knows.” “ I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Cass. “I bet you don’t know Cass’s real name.” Cass laughed. “He does, but he’s forgotten it.” He looked at her. “That’s true, I have. What is your real name—? I know you hate it, that’s why nobody ever uses it. ” “Richard just did,” she said. “I think he did it just to tease me.” Ida showed him the book’s dedication page, which read for Clarissa, my wife . “That’s cute, isn’t it?” She looked at Cass. “You sure had me fooled, baby; you just don’t seem to be the Clarissa type .” “As it turned out,” said Cass, with a smile. Then she looked at Vivaldo. “Ah,” she said, “did you happen to note a very small note in today’s theatrical section?” She went to the sofa and picked up one of the newspapers and returned to Vivaldo. “Look.

• From Another Country (1962)

  She was not a singer yet. And if she were to be judged solely on the basis of her voice, low, rough-textured, of no very great range, she never would be. Yet, she had something which made Eric look up and caused the room to fall silent; and Vivaldo stared at Ida as though he had never seen her before. What she lacked in vocal power and, at the moment, in skill, she compensated for by a quality so mysteriously and implacably egocentric that no one has ever been able to name it. This quality involves a sense of the self so profound and so powerful that it does not so much leap barriers as reduce them to atoms—while still leaving them standing, mightily, where they were; and this awful sense is private, unknowable, not to be articulated, having, literally, to do with something else; it transforms and lays waste and gives life, and kills. She finished her first number and the applause was stunned and sporadic. She looked over at Vivaldo with a small, childish shrug. And this gesture somehow revealed to Eric how desperately one could love her, how desperately Vivaldo was in love with her. The drummer went into a down-on-the-levee-type song, which turned out to be a song Eric had never heard before: Betty told Dupree She wanted a diamond ring. And Dupree said, Betty, I’ll get you most any old thing. “My God,” muttered Vivaldo, “she’s been working.” His tone unconsciously implied that he had not been, and held an unconscious resentment. And this threw Eric in on himself. Neither had he been working—for a long time; he had merely been keeping his hand in. It had been because of Yves; so he had told himself; but was this true? He looked at Vivaldo’s white, passionate face and wondered if Vivaldo were now thinking that he had not been working because of Ida: who had not, however, allowed him to distract her. There she was, up on the stand, and unless all the signs were false, and no matter how hard or long the road might be, she was on her way. She had started. Give Mama my clothes, Give Betty my diamond ring. Tomorrow’s Friday, The day I got to swing. She and the musicians were beginning to enjoy each other and to egg each other on as they bounced through this ballad of cupidity, treachery, and death; and Ida had created in the room a new atmosphere and a new excitement. Even the heat seemed less intolerable. The musicians played for her as though she were an old friend come home and their pride in her restored their pride in themselves.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Charlotte had also stayed in Oxford, but was not doing graduate work. She had begun to write seriously and now lived in a tiny room in the Iffley Road, and to pay the rent was working as a clerk in the local tax office. There was just enough space for a bed and a desk. When we sat there together, drinking coffee or a bottle of cheap wine, I felt full of admiration. I could not imagine how anybody had the courage to be a writer, but undeterred by her grim surroundings, Charlotte was steadily amassing a pile of typewritten sheets. Yet in some ways Charlotte seemed as ill equipped for the world as I. She too seemed to be imprisoned in her own Shalott. She was in love, and Mike, whom none of us was allowed to meet, dropped in on her sporadically whenever it suited him. Charlotte could never go to visit him or even call him, because she was not permitted to know his address or telephone number. Meanwhile, Mike roamed the countryside in his van, eschewing the trap of security and a regular job. It seemed imperative to his masculinity that he retain the initiative in his dealings with Charlotte. I had scarcely heard of feminism, but I found it quite outrageous that brave, talented Charlotte should live as a virtual prisoner because this useless drifter needed to be “free.” She was reluctant to leave her room in case Mike deigned to drop by while she was out, so she could never come and visit me at the Harts’ and we could never meet in a pub or some more cheerful venue. Whenever Charlotte jumped up at the sound of the communal phone or because a car door slammed in the street below, I vowed that if I ever fell in love, I would never allow myself to be so enslaved.