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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (de Cons. Ev. ii. 49.) A question of discrepancy is raised upon this, that Mark says the Lord was in the house when the woman came praying for her daughter. Indeed Matthew might have been understood to have omitted mention of the house, and yet to have been relating the same event; but when he says, that the disciples suggested to the Lord, Send her away, for she crieth after us, he seems to indicate clearly that the woman raised her voice in supplication, in following the Lord who was walking. We must understand then, that, as Mark writes, she entered in where Jesus was, that is, as he had noticed above, in the house; then, that as Matthew writes. He answered her not a word, and during this silence of both sides, Jesus left the house; and then the rest follows without any discordance. CHRYSOSTOM. I judge that the disciples were sorry for the woman’s affliction, yet dared not say ‘Grant her this mercy,’ but only Send her away, as we, when we would persuade any one, oftentimes say the very contrary to what we wish. He answered and said, I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. JEROME. He says that He is not sent to the Gentiles, but that He is sent first to Israel, so that when they would not receive the Gospel, the passing over to the Gentiles might have just cause. REMIGIUS. In this way also He was sent specially to the Jews, because He taught them by His bodily presence. JEROME. And He adds of the house of Israel, with this design, that we might rightly interpret by this place that other parable concerning the stray sheep. CHRYSOSTOM. But when the woman saw that the Apostles had no power, she became bold with commendable boldness; for before she had not dared to come before His sight; but, as it is said, She crieth after us. But when it seemed that she must now retire without being relieved, she came nearer, But she came and worshipped him. JEROME. Note how perseveringly this Chananæan woman calls Him first Son of David, then Lord, and lastly came and worshipped him, as God. CHRYSOSTOM. And therefore she said not Ask, or Pray God for me, but Lord, help me. But the more the woman urged her petition, the more He strengthened His denial; for He calls the Jews now not sheep but sons, and the Gentiles dogs; He answered and said unto her, It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and give it to dogs. GLOSS. (ap. Anselm.) The Jews were born sons, and brought up by the Law in the worship of one God. The bread is the Gospel, its miracles and other things which pertain to our salvation. It is not then meet that these should be taken from the children and given to the Gentiles, who are dogs, till the Jews refuse them.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Although tackling two subjects as complex and controversial as the evolution of beauty and the origins of humankind in one volume was an intellectually daring feat, Descent is generally considered a difficult, or even flawed, work. By building his argument so slowly and incrementally, writing in such dry, discursive prose, and citing so many learned authorities in support of the ideas he was advancing, Darwin might have thought he could draw any reasonable reader to accept the inevitability of his radical conclusions. But his rhetorical tactics failed, and in the end Descent was criticized by both creationist opponents of the very concept of evolution and fellow scientists who accepted natural selection but were adamantly opposed to sexual selection. To this day, Descent has never had the same intellectual impact as Origin. — The most notable and revolutionary feature of Darwin’s theory of mate choice is that it was explicitly aesthetic. He described the evolutionary origin of beauty in nature as a consequence of the fact that animals had evolved to be beautiful to themselves. What was so radical about this idea was that it positioned organisms—especially female organisms—as active agents in the evolution of their own species. Unlike natural selection, which emerges from external forces in nature, such as competition, predation, climate, and geography, acting on the organism, sexual selection is a potentially independent, self-directed process in which the organisms themselves (mostly female) were in charge. Darwin described females as having a “taste for the beautiful” and an “aesthetic faculty.” He described males as trying to “charm” their mates: With the great majority of animals…the taste for the beautiful is confined to the attractions of the opposite sex.* The sweet strains poured forth by many male birds during the season of love are certainly admired by the females, of which fact evidence will hereafter be given. If female birds had been incapable of appreciating the beautiful colours, the ornaments, and voices of their male partners, all the labour and anxiety by the latter in displaying their charms before the females would have been thrown away; and this is impossible to admit… On the whole, birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals, excepting of course man, and they have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have…[Birds] charm the female by vocal and instrumental music of the most varied kinds.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  This presentation employs an eclectic armory of sources: law and literature, scientific treatises and moralizing tracts, even a glance at the ubiquitous erotic art of the Roman Empire. The mélange is deliberate, for it helps us resist the temptation to ascribe supremacy to any one witness or class of witnesses. There will be no doubting, however, which type of informant is accorded a measure of favoritism: the novelist. The history of the ancient novel is effectively coterminous with the four centuries of Roman Empire. Rarely in history are great genres of literature born, and when they are, it surely signals a significant cultural juncture. The novels are tales of eros; they are dedicated to the power of eros and celebrate its divine power. A heady synthesis of comedy, love poetry, travel literature, and philosophy, the novels are the quintessential cultural expression of a civilization with a mature tradition of speculation on human sexual experience. At the same time, the novels are breathtakingly unique creations whose narrative intricacy allowed their authors to explore, slowly and with a new sympathy, the contours of the soul experiencing eros. On the whole, the romances strike a tone of wry conservatism. These stories are the product of a confident and assertive aristocracy, capable of believing that the world could be redeemed through social reproduction. But it is too much to declare the novels simple propaganda. Their authors are too alert to the unruly power of eros, too eager to portray the sinuous routes to conjugal love to be trying to put over something as bland as a point. In particular, Chapter 1 lets Leucippe and Clitophon, a romance written in the second century by an author named Achilles Tatius, act as a guide as we trek across the landscape of imperial sexual culture. Among the surviving romances, Leucippe and Clitophon is probably the most sensational and certainly the most canny. The whole work is marked by a sly, if not subversive, sympathy for the inevitable disjuncture between the inarticulate mysteries of human sexuality and the artificial constraints of any erotic code. Achilles Tatius makes an ideal tour guide, one who knows all the traditional details but gleefully spills unauthorized truths.8

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Another avenue builder, the Great Bowerbird (Chlamydera nuchalis), has a wide distribution in dry open woodlands across the northern third of the Australian continent. In most Great Bowerbird populations, males collect and display light-colored pebbles, bones, and snail shells for their bowers. But the males of one population of Great Bowerbirds are particularly original in their choice of decorations, as I had occasion to observe in 2010, when I visited the Broome Bird Observatory in the northwestern corner of Australia. This preserve sits on the shores of Roebuck Bay, which is lined by steep, five- to twenty-meter-high cliffs of red clay and stratified rocks. About half a kilometer from the ocean cliff face, I observed a Great Bowerbird avenue bower with a surrounding courtyard decorated at both front and back with a vast pile of bleached, brilliantly white fossil clam shells (color plate 18). This bird’s bower was a virtual paleontological museum, displaying fascinating examples of the earth’s extinct biodiversity to attract prospective mates. Quite literally, this male’s territorial calls meant “Do you want to come over and see my fossil collection?” The shells were so distinct in shape and color that it was easy to identify their source. At certain places along the red cliffs that tower over the bay, a brilliantly white layer of material about a foot thick is exposed. Closer inspection revealed that this was a layer of white fossil bivalves that had been deposited in abundance during an earlier epoch in the geological history of this corner of the ancient continent. As a museum curator myself, I felt a certain affinity with this bowerbird’s paleontological passion. The second major architectural style made by bowerbirds is the maypole bower, which consists of a pile of horizontal sticks placed around a central support, usually a sapling or a small tree. The stack of brown sticks is cone shaped, broadest at the base, and narrowing at the top to form a structure that is like a bottlebrush, or a bizarre, minimalist, postmodern Christmas tree. At the base of the maypole, the male clears a circular path, or runway, which allows the male and the female to run a rapid circuit around the maypole during the courtship maneuvers. The court, which is located outside this circular runway, is decorated with materials the male has gathered, which can include flowers, fruits, beetle and butterfly parts, and even fungus. Some bowerbird species also adorn the twigs and branches of their Christmas-tree-like structure with decorative materials, such as regurgitated fruit pulp. (Okay, so maybe that’s not so much like a Christmas tree.)

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  In manakins, female mate choices have fundamentally reshaped the nature of an all-male world they rarely visit in order to advance both female sexual fancy and freedom of choice. The result has been the evolution of the lek itself and of the numerous and astonishing variations in coordinated male display found in so many species. Nearly 150 years after The Descent of Man, we must wonder whether Darwin’s statement—“Birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals, excepting of course man”—went far enough. If we measure the aesthetic accomplishment of an individual or a species in terms of the share of energy and investment dedicated to aesthetic expression, then manakins far exceed humans. All manakin males—half of the species—expend most of their time and energies in the rehearsal, perfection, and performance of a set of highly choreographed song and dance routines, in duet, group, and solo forms. By Darwin’s criteria, the manakins and bowerbirds beat humans by far! [image file=image_rsrc3NX.jpg] CHAPTER 8Human Beauty Happens TooCharles Darwin’s Descent of Man is basically a long book about the evolution of humans, with a few chapters about birds and other animals. Darwin included the birds (and other animals) in order to better support his hypothesis that sexual selection played a critical role in human evolution. This book takes a similar approach, but with the ratio of people to birds reversed. The mixed approach is as vital and productive today as it was then. By applying what we’ve learned about mate choice through our examination of the evolution of birds, we can gain a much fuller understanding of its role in shaping the appearance and the sexual behavior of our own species. The forces we’ve witnessed in birds—Beauty Happens, sexual conflict, and aesthetic remodeling—play out in humans and their primate ancestors, too, and the chapters that follow will speculate as to how. I say “speculate,” because human aesthetic evolution is a new science and most of the theories I offer here will need to be tested and analyzed with data from comparative studies and sociological investigations. But as we’ve seen with the birds, aesthetic evolution has great explanatory power, and what’s more, it rescues us from the tedious and limiting adaptationist insistence on the ubiquitous power of natural selection. And indeed, the study of human mate choice is currently dominated by such insistence, in the form of a field called evolutionary psychology. Contemporary evolutionary psychology has a profound, constitutive, often fanatical commitment to the universal efficacy of adaptation by natural selection. The application of the concept of adaptation to human biology is the organizing principle of the field. Evolutionary psychologists view human sexual ornaments and behavior as a cornucopia of honest advertisements and adaptive strategies. There is never any doubt what the conclusion of any evolutionary psychology study will be. The only question is how far the study will have to go to get there.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  [image "The obligate coordinated display of a group of male Blue Manakins for a visiting female (perched at right). As the male closest to the female leaps up and flutters back down the branch, the perched males sidle up the branch toward the female. The cycle is repeated dozens or even hundreds of times." file=image_rsrc3NV.jpg] The obligate coordinated display of a group of male Blue Manakins for a visiting female (perched at right). As the male closest to the female leaps up and flutters back down the branch, the perched males sidle up the branch toward the female. The cycle is repeated dozens or even hundreds of times. Considerable skill and coordination are involved in putting on these performances. Because the females are extremely discerning, their preferences select for males who have been in male-male social relationships that have lasted long enough to have allowed them plenty of time to practice diligently and iron out any kinks in their performances. Apparently, it can take years of practice to achieve vocal coordination between males that is good enough to attract mates. The ornithologists Jill Trainer and David McDonald have shown that the timing of the vocal coordination in the Toleedo…Toleedo…duet sung by male pairs of Long-tailed Manakins greatly influences their chances at sexual success. This cooperative mode of display behavior has reorganized the entire breeding system of the Chiroxiphia manakins, resulting in a distinctly new form of lek. Chiroxiphia males do not defend individual territories, as other manakins do. Rather, each display territory is controlled by a team of males. The team consists of a dominant, alpha male who shares the territory with a subordinate beta—or in the case of Chiroxiphia caudata, with beta, gamma, and even epsilon males—all of them aspiring one day to succeed him as alpha male. The male partnerships within these shared territories are long-lasting and established over the course of years of interactions. But the road to this kind of partnership is filled with challenges for the wannabe alphas. The young males must compete with each other as each of them strives to become an established beta male or alpha territory holder. And before they can even enter the competition, they must wait out the four-year period it takes for them to achieve mature adult plumage. At first, the young males look like green females, and each year they molt into a successively more male-like plumage. During this period, the subadult males consort with various groups and participate in rudimentary displays. Once they achieve adult plumage, males typically spend several more years displaying as floaters, trying to win the approval of an alpha male whom they can partner with. During this apprenticeship time they continue to work on improving the temporal coordination of their duetting songs and displays.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  If this man had not maintained peace in the world, and revived the economy of the empire, his personal fortunes and misfortunes would have moved me less. One can never give enough time to the absorbing study of relationships between texts. The poem on the hunting trophy consecrated by Hadrian at Thespiae to the God of Love and to the Uranian Venus, "on the hills of Helicon, beside Narcissus" spring", can be dated as of the autumn of the year 124; at about that same time the emperor passed through Mantinea, where, according to Pausanius, he had the tomb of Epaminondas rebuilt, and wrote a poem to be inscribed upon it. The Mantinean inscription is now lost, but Hadrian's act of homage is to be fully understood, perhaps, only if we view it in relation to a passage of Plutarch's Morals which tells us that Epaminondas was buried in that place between two young friends struck down at his side. If for date of the meeting of the emperor and Antinous we accept the stay in Asia Minor of 123-124, which is in any case the most plausible date and the best supported by iconographical evidence, these two poems then would form a part of what might be called the Antinous cycle; both are inspired by that same Greece of heroic lovers which Arrian evoked later on, after the death of the favorite, when he compared the youth to Patroclus. A certain number of persons whose portraits one would wish to develop: Plotina, Sabina, Arrian, Suetonius. But Hadrian could see them only in part, from the point of view at which he was standing. Antinous himself has to be presented by refraction, through the emperor's memories, that is to say, in passionately meticulous detail, not devoid of a few errors. All that can be said of the temperament of Antinous is inscribed in any one of his likenesses. "Eager and impassionated tenderness, sullen effeminacy": Shelley, with a poet's admirable candor, says the essential in six words, while most of the nineteenth-century art critics and historians could only expatiate upon the subject with righteous declamation, or else idealize about it, vaguely and hypocritically. We are rich in portraits of Antinous; they range in quality from the mediocre to the incomparable. Despite variations due to the skill of the respective sculptors or to the age of the model, or to differences between portraits made from life and those executed to commemorate the youth after death, all are striking and deeply moving because of the incredible realism of the face, always immediately recognizable and nevertheless so diversely interpreted, and because they are examples, unique in classical antiquity, of survival and repetition in stone of a countenance which was neither that of a statesman nor of a philosopher, but simply of one who was loved.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The controversial conversation piece in which Aldo appeared with the as yet unmartyred St Sebastian hung alongside. Sebastian was a boy of tedious, waxen beauty, with a little loincloth about to tumble down. They had been cleverly posed against a projected backdrop taken from some Tuscan master, but for all the quattrocento piquancy of their gestures they reminded me of nothing so much as those queeny fashion spreads in Tatler and Uomo Vogue. The impression was reinforced by a surge of Trouble for Men across my nostrils and the appearance at biceps level of the luminous pink spectacles of Guy Parvis. For a second I thought I might actually be caught up in one of his Alternative Image TV programmes, and prepared to sidestep the cameras as they zoomed in on Sebastian’s Gillette-smooth profile. But it seemed he was there in a private capacity. I distanced myself even as I was perversely drawn to stare at him, keen to pick up any absurd and memorable remarks. I finished my glass of wine and downed most of another while I looked at the handsome bearded St Laurence with his dinky little gridiron, and the St Stephen who crouched appealingly in a shaft of light while above him the shadowy form of an immense black whom I would have liked to meet held a stone aloft. St Peter was Ashley, who worked out at the Corry, but he was not seen to best advantage upside-down. The bell clacked frequently now and we early browsers became subsumed into the crowd of callers, who greeted each other, kissed, caught up on their news, walked backwards into other guests without apologising and generally, as if they were in a private house where such curiosity would have been unseemly, ignored the pictures. Those who had equipped themselves with a price list were forced into the crude necessity of asking the drinkers to move so as to get some distance on the martyrs or to squinny at the numbered labels. I took another drink and moved downstairs. Here there was a series of life-size nudes, in a sculptural Whitehaven style—martyrs only to the bench and the Nautilus machine—and a set of plates made to illustrate a limited edition of John Gray’s Tombeau d’Oscar Wilde along with Stephen Devlin’s setting of the poem for tenor, string quartet and oboe d’a-more—a martyrdom with a whole teeming afterlife. The photographs were balletic and metaphorical, with a good deal of emphasis on the slim gilt soul aspect and a number of images, in Staines’s most typical style, crossed and half-obscured by the shadows of prison bars.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  In a culture where foundations prefer quick results and time- limited programs, the Zellerbach Family Fund has had the wisdom and courage to recognize the matchless contribution of long-term follow- up studies of children.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  It could be proved, if need were, that these four men had plotted my death; it was to their interest, in any case, to do so. Every transition from one reign to another involved its operations of mopping up; he had taken this task upon himself in order to leave my hands clean. If public opinion demanded a victim, nothing was simpler than to deprive him of his post of Praetorian prefect. He had envisaged such a measure; he was advising me to take it. And if more were needed to conciliate the Senate, he would approve my going as far as relegation to the provinces, or exile. Attianus had been the guardian from whom money could be wheedled, the counselor of my difficult days, the faithful agent; but this was the first time that I had ever looked attentively at that face with its carefully shaven jowls, at those crippled hands tranquilly clasped over the handle of his ebony cane. I knew well enough the different elements of his life as a prosperous citizen: his wife, whom he loved, and whose health was frail; his married daughters and their children, for whom he was modest but tenacious in his ambitions, as he had been for himself; his love of choice dishes; his decided taste for Greek cameos and for young dancing girls. He had given me precedence over all these things: for thirty years his first care had been to protect me, and next to serve me. To me, who had not yet given first place to anything except to ideas or projects, or at the most to a future image of myself, this simple devotion of man to man seemed prodigious and unfathomable. No one is worthy of it, and I am still unable to account for it. I followed his counsel: he lost his post. His faint smile showed me that he expected to be taken at his word. He knew well that no untimely solicitude toward an old friend would ever keep me from adopting the more prudent course; this subtle politician would not have wished me otherwise. Let us not exaggerate the extent of his disgrace: after some months of eclipse, I succeeded in having him admitted to the Senate. It was the greatest honor that I could offer to this man of equestrian rank. He lived to enjoy the easy old age of a wealthy Roman knight, much sought after for his perfect knowledge of families and public affairs; I have often been his guest at his villa in the Alban Hills.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  In order to calm my fears I used to say to myself that the empire could find worse masters; Servianus after all was not without qualities; even the dull Fuscus would one day perhaps be worthy to reign. But all the energy which I had left was summoned to refuse this lie, and I wished to live if only to crush that viper. On coming back to Rome I saw much of Lucius again. In former days I had made commitments to him which ordinarily one hardly troubles to fulfill, but which I had kept. It is not true, however, that I had promised him the imperial purple; such things are not done. But for nearly fifteen years I had paid his debts, hushed up his scandals, and answered his letters without delay; delightful letters they were, but they always ended with requests for money for himself, or for advancement for his friends. He was too much mingled with my life for me to exclude him from it had I wished to do so, but I wished nothing of the sort. His conversation was brilliant: this young man whom people judged superficial had read more, and more intelligently, than the writers who make such works their profession. In everything his taste was exquisite, whether for people, objects, manners, or the most exact fashion of scanning a line of Greek verse. In the Senate, where he was considered able, he had made a reputation as an orator: his speeches were at the same time terse and ornate, and served immediately upon utterance as models for the professors of eloquence. I had had him named praetor, and then consul: he had fulfilled these functions well. Some years earlier I had arranged a marriage for him with the daughter of Nigrinus, one of the consular conspirators executed at the beginning of my reign; that union became the emblem of my policy of conciliation. It was but moderately successful: the young woman complained of being neglected, but she had three children by him, one of whom was a son. To her almost continual repining he would reply with frigid politeness that one marries for one's family's sake and not for oneself, and that so weighty a contract ill affords with the carefree play of love. His complicated system demanded mistresses for display and willing slaves for sensuous delights. He was killing himself in pursuit of pleasure, but was doing so like an artist who destroys himself in completing a masterpiece: it is not for me to reproach him in that.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Before the service began, I thought about all the time I had spent with Walter after he got out. Then the choir sang, and the preacher gave a rousing sermon. He spoke about Walter being pulled away from his family in the prime of his life by lies and bigotry. I told the congregation that Walter had become like a brother to me, that he was brave to trust his life to someone who was as young as I was then. I explained that we all owed Walter something because he had been threatened and terrorized, wrongly accused and wrongly condemned, but he never gave up. He survived the humiliation of his trial and the charges against him. He survived a guilty verdict, death row, and the wrongful condemnation of an entire state. While he did not survive without injury or trauma, he came out with his dignity. I told people that Walter had overcome what fear, ignorance, and bigotry had done to him. He had stood strong in the face of injustice, and his exonerated witness might just make the rest of us a little safer, slightly more protected from the abuse of power and the false accusations that had almost killed him. I suggested to his friends and family that Walter’s strength, resistance, and perseverance were a triumph worth celebrating, an accomplishment to be remembered. I felt the need to explain to people what Walter had taught me. Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent. A system that denies the poor the legal help they need, that makes wealth and status more important than culpability, must be changed. Walter’s case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous. I reflected on how mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities with our hopeless willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us. I told the congregation that Walter’s case had taught me that the death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill?

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

  Objection 4: Further, “What things soever were written,” especially of Christ, “were written for our learning,” according to Rom. 15:4. But some of the things written in the Gospels touching Christ’s burial in no wise seem to pertain to our instruction—as that He was buried “in a garden . . .” in a tomb which was not His own, which was “new,” and “hewed out in a rock.” Therefore the manner of Christ’s burial was not becoming. On the contrary, It is written (Is. 11:10): “And His sepulchre shall be glorious.” I answer that, The manner of Christ’s burial is shown to be seemly in three respects. First, to confirm faith in His death and resurrection. Secondly, to commend the devotion of those who gave Him burial. Hence Augustine says (De Civ. Dei i): “The Gospel mentions as praiseworthy the deed of those who received His body from the cross, and with due care and reverence wrapped it up and buried it.” Thirdly, as to the mystery whereby those are molded who “are buried together with Christ into death” (Rom. 6:4). Reply to Objection 1: With regard to Christ’s death, His patience and constancy in enduring death are commended, and all the more that His death was the more despicable: but in His honorable burial we can see the power of the dying Man, who, even in death, frustrated the intent of His murderers, and was buried with honor: and thereby is foreshadowed the devotion of the faithful who in the time to come were to serve the dead Christ. Reply to Objection 2: On that expression of the Evangelist (Jn. 19:40) that they buried Him “as the manner of the Jews is to bury,” Augustine says (Tract. in Joan. cxx): “He admonishes us that in offices of this kind which are rendered to the dead, the custom of each nation should be observed.” Now it was the custom of this people to anoint bodies with various spices in order the longer to preserve them from corruption [*Cf. Catena Aurea in Joan. xix]. Accordingly it is said in De Doctr. Christ. iii that “in all such things, it is not the use thereof, but the luxury of the user that is at fault”; and, farther on: “what in other persons is frequently criminal, in a divine or prophetic person is a sign of something great.” For myrrh and aloes by their bitterness denote penance, by which man keeps Christ within himself without the corruption of sin; while the odor of the ointments expresses good report.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I can finally be who I am.” Our meeting had lasted three hours and both of us were spent emotionally. It was a sad, moving, gallant story, and Karen had told it vividly. Both of us cried as she spoke and both of us ended up smiling and thankful that she had ended on a note that was at least partly upbeat and hopeful. She was on her way to her wedding day. I’d been granted a great privilege to share her life. I wished, as I so often do, that I were a novelist so that I could capture the richness of her feelings and the amazing sweep of changes she had made in her life. As we embraced, I thanked Karen for her generosity and candor. I told her how impressed I was with her, how proud I was of all she’d done, and how much I hoped the years ahead would make up for her past sorrows. She invited me to stay in touch and offered to send me snapshots of their new home. The door was almost closed behind Karen when she turned back and pushed it open. Smiling, she said, “Maybe your next book should be about what happens to all of us when we grow up.” Little did I realize how prophetic her words would turn out to be. • • • AFTER KAREN LEFT, I sat for a long time thinking about the unexpected twists and turns in her life. Did her parents have any idea of what they had started twenty-five years ago when they filed for divorce? If they had known the long-term consequences for their children, would they have done things differently? Would they have divorced? Like most people back then, they probably thought divorce was a minor upheaval in the lives of children. They undoubtedly expected that family life would soon resume its normal course and that parents and children alike would benefit from an end to marital conflict. Surely they did not foresee lasting effects that would extend into the fourth decade of Karen’s life. I thought back on the lovely, wistful child who had tenderly taken care of her distraught mother, younger siblings, and father when he became a “basket case”—and how she had forfeited her own teenage years. I could see her face contorted with grief when in her early twenties she told me how she anguished over whether to leave the young man she had committed to simply because he had been kind to her. Preoccupied with fears of loss, betrayal, and abandonment, she was still locked into the self-sacrificial caregiver role of her childhood and had reinstalled it in her adult relationships with men. But Karen had turned her life around. I was stunned by how much she’d changed since our last meeting.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Untrue is a book with a point of view—namely that whatever else we may think of them, women who reject monogamy are brave, and their experiences and possible motivations are instructive. Not only because female infidelity is far from uncommon but also because the fact of it and our reactions to it are useful metrics of female autonomy, and of the price women continue to pay for seizing privileges that have historically belonged to men. This book is not an exhaustive review of the literature on infidelity, though it does reference the dozens of articles and books I read in a range of fields in an attempt to get my arms around the topic. But for the many studies I cite that suggest female “extra-pair” sexual behavior is a social and reproductive strategy that has served females in particular contexts well over the millennia, there are other studies that argue or suggest otherwise. I am only your guide to my view—informed by the social science and science to which I was drawn and to which I was referred by experts whom I believe are correcting bias in their fields—that what we today call female promiscuity is a behavior with a remarkably long tail, so to speak, a fascinating history and prehistory, and a no less intriguing future. And that it merits open-minded consideration from multiple perspectives. For too long we have handed our sexual problems and peccadillos exclusively to therapists and psychologists, presuming the issues to be personal, even pathological—rooted primarily in our emotional baggage, our families of origin, our “unique difficulties” with trust and commitment—and presuming they have solutions. But these ostensibly most personal matters—how and why we have sex, why we struggle with monogamy—have deep historic and prehistoric underpinnings as well. Biological factors, social control, cultural context, ecologies—female sexuality and our menu of options are shaped by all these factors and more. Rethinking topics as complex as female infidelity and our often heated responses to it arguably requires multiple lenses—sociology, evolutionary biology, primatology, and literary theory are just a few discourses that can enhance our understanding, reframing the adulteress in ways that facilitate greater empathy and understanding of her—and of ourselves.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Sometimes, as Larry’s story shows, the child can rescue himself by finding mentors or summoning the inner strength to become his own parent. Both groups of children enter adulthood with low self-esteem, a hunger for love and human closeness, and badly skewed views of man-woman relationships. Women who are exposed to the sexual acting out of their parents are more likely to become promiscuous starting in their early teens and continuing into their twenties. But in what may be a silver lining to this dark cloud, their promiscuity tapers off as they reach their thirties. Some decide to just stop because they’re afraid of getting hurt or becoming ill. Others find that sex no longer relieves their depression. Still others are lucky enough to meet men who, as one woman put it, “refused to be just the next guy in line.” Two women in the divorced group joined churches with strict standards for moral behavior. “It took the church to keep my legs closed,” one told me seriously. The men raised in chaotic marriages and chaotic divorces also suffer low self-esteem but it’s not usually manifest in promiscuity. Rather, they turn to alcohol and drugs. Unlike their sisters who give up reckless sex, the men’s addictive behaviors overall do not wane as they reach their late twenties and early thirties. Nevertheless, a few of these men and women—six in all in our study—turned their lives around when they joined mainstream churches. None had gone to these churches as children, but here they found the moral guidelines they had been missing as children. They found spouses and a community that provided the support they had always longed for. I left Larry in his early twenties full of admiration for the progress he had achieved in rejecting the alcohol and violence that were the ideals of his adolescent years. But I had more questions than answers about what lay ahead for him. After years of rage in childhood and adolescence, can a young man fully turn his life around? Can he set new goals and sustain his progress by his own efforts? Can he decide to be his own father and carry it off? Larry had been propelled far by his disappointment and anger at his father. His decision to adopt his father as a negative image had energized his grueling work and school program and kept him going. But how would that affect his future relationships with women and in making the important life choices that lay ahead? Considering the view of man-woman relationships that he had experienced in his family, would he be able to become the good husband and father that he aspired to be? Although the lives of all these young people were full of unexpected turns, Larry’s history so far was baffling.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  We were talking, as we did those days after work when we were too exhausted to head home just yet. We talked about his guns, of school, how he might drop out, how the Colt factory in Windsor might be hiring again now that the latest shooting spree was three months done and already old news, we talked of the next game out on Xbox, his old man, his old man’s drinking, we talked of sunflowers, how goofy they looked, like cartoons, Trevor said, but real. We talked about you, about your nightmares, your loosening mind, his face troubled as he listened, which made his pout more defined. A long silence. Then Trevor took out his cell phone, snapped a picture at the colors at the sky’s end, then put it back in his pocket without reviewing what he took. Our eyes met. He flashed an embarrassed smile, then looked away and started picking at a pimple on his chin. “Cleopatra,” he said after a while. “What?” “Cleopatra saw the same sunset. Ain’t that crazy? Like everybody who was ever alive only seen one sun.” He gestured to indicate the whole town, even though we were the only people there far as the eye could see. “No wonder people used to think it was god himself.” “Said who?” “People.” He chewed his lip for a moment. “Sometimes I wanna just go that way forever.” He pointed his chin beyond the sycamores. “Like just psssh.” I studied his arm propped behind him, the thin, flowing muscles, field-toned and burger-fed, shifting as he talked. I flung the last rind from the grapefruit I was peeling off the roof. What about our skeletons, I wanted to ask, how do we get away from them—but thought better of it. “It must suck to be the sun, though,” I said, handing him a pink half. He put the whole half in his mouth. “Hob bob?” “Finish chewing you animal.” He rolled back his eyes and bobbled his head playfully, as if possessed, the clear juice dripping down his chin, his neck, the indent under his Adam’s apple, no larger than a thumbprint, glistening. He swallowed, wiped his mouth with the back of his arm. “How come?” he repeated, serious. “’Cause you never see yourself if you’re the sun. You don’t even know where you are in the sky.” I placed a wedge on my tongue, letting the acid sting the place where I’d bit the inside of my cheek all week for no reason. He looked at me thoughtfully, turned the idea in his head, his lips wet with juice. “Like you don’t even know if you’re round or square or even if you’re ugly or not,” I continued. I wanted it to sound important, urgent—but had no idea if I believed it. “Like you can only see what you do to the earth, the colors and stuff, but not who you are.” I glanced at him.

• From Untrue (2018)

  She grew up to train as a sex therapist and counselor, eventually earning her EdD in family life education from Columbia. After serving on the board of Planned Parenthood, where she met William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Dobbs Butts became the first African American to be trained at the Masters and Johnson Institute. But she brought her very own thinking to the field. Dobbs Butts viewed sexuality through the lens of all the shifts happening in American culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s—the civil rights movement, America’s reckoning with its racist past, and our country’s worship of power and dominance—and committed herself to the project of crossing important and relevant research over into popular culture. Specifically, she wanted black men and women, whose sexualities had so long been mired in stereotypes and misrepresentations, to have access to facts. In 1977, she wrote Ebony magazine’s first feature article on sexuality, “Sex Education: Who Needs It?” and penned other sensationally popular pieces like “Sex and the Modern Black Couple” for that magazine. She went on to contribute to Jet and Essence, where she wrote their most popular monthly column, Sexual Health, from 1980 to 1982. She repeatedly took on the massive and frequently controversial task of confronting the same sexual hypocrisies Frenchie Davis calls out today. As Dobbs Butts observed, “Americans snicker at sexual references in polite society, yet are embarrassed to talk about their sexual lives, especially if they are experiencing inadequacies or discomfort.” Her work went a far distance to disentangle black sexuality from the death grip of controlling images, and in many ways she, like Wyatt, paved the way for today’s most important, provocative African American female storytellers and image makers.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The love for statues of classical antiquity, those great peaceful objects which seem so solid and yet are so easily destroyed, is an uncommon taste among private collectors in these agitated times, cut off from both past and future. The new possessor of the bas-relief of Antonianos, acting on the advice of experts, has just had it cleaned by a specialist whose light, slow rubbing by hand has removed the rust and moisture stains from the marble and restored its soft gleam, like that of alabaster or of ivory.] * Addition of 1958. The second of these masterpieces is the famous sardonyx known as the Marlborough Gem, because it once belonged to that family collection, now dispersed. For more than thirty years this fine intaglio seemed to have been lost, or hidden away, but in January of 1952 it came to light in a public sale in London; the informed taste of the great collector Giorgio Sangiorgi has brought it back to Rome. I am indebted to him for the chance to see and to handle this unique gem. A signature, though no longer complete, can be read around the edge; it is thought, and doubtless correctly, to be that of the sculptor of the bas-relief, Antonianos of Aphrodisias. So skilfully has the master-carver enclosed that perfect profile within the narrow compass of a sardonyx that this bit of stone stands as testimony to a great lost art quite as much as does any statue or any relief. The proportions of the work make us forget the dimensions of the object. At some time during the Byzantine period the gem was set in a nugget of solid gold, and in this form passed from collector to collector, none of whose names we know, until it reached Venice; it is mentioned as part of a great seventeenth-century collection there. In the next century it was purchased by the celebrated dealer in antiques, Gavin Hamilton, and brought to England, whence it now returns to Rome, its starting-point. Of all objects still above ground today it is the one of which we can assume with some assurance that it has often been held in Hadrian's hands. One has to go into the most remote corners of a subject in order to discover the simplest things, and things of most general literary interest.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I asked the father whether he had ever thought of asking his daughter to fly to his home. He said sharply, “I don’t want my little girl alone on an airplane.” I was very impressed with his sensitivity and concern and so I said, “Your child is very fortunate to have you for her father.” As I glanced at the man, I was startled to see tears rolling slowly down his cheek. “Doctor, you’re crying!” “You’re the only person in the whole world who has ever said that to me,” he said. “Everyone else tells me that I’m a fool.” There may be many sensitive, loving fathers or mothers who would be willing to make the necessary sacrifice in order to fly to visit their children. Perhaps no one ever asked them. I FOURTEEN Sex and Drugs n Larry’s and Carol’s stories I talked a bit about drug and alcohol abuse during adolescence and the astonishing rise in sexual promiscuity among many of the young girls from both chaotic intact and chaotic postdivorce families. But we still have not delved into the heart of these destructive behaviors and what the child gains from them psychologically. Paula shows us the inner logic of running out of control. The next time I saw Paula she was fifteen and looked about twenty-five. She was thin, very attractive, and very, very precocious. Her green eyes, lined with heavy black eyeliner, were bloodshot, whether from her incessant smoking or from some other drug I could not tell. With her black, short, sleeveless dress artfully falling from one shoulder and her legs encased in high red leather boots, she was the picture of what her exasperated mother had warned me of a week earlier: “Don’t be surprised, Judy. She looks like a slut.” With bravado, constantly tossing her long, curly hair into and then out of her eyes, she told me of her numerous boyfriends and of her adventures partying and evading the police and the school authorities. She boasted about being high every day and of the huge quantities of alcohol that she and her friends drank. In describing a confused mixture of sexual exploits and physical fights, she told me, “I give as good as I get.” She looked very tough and seemed utterly lost. I remember being saddened and very troubled by Paula at this time, but I wasn’t surprised. Her mother told me that the trouble started the summer after sixth grade when Paula turned twelve. In the next two years, Paula accumulated a police record for possession of drugs, disrupting the peace, and drinking in public. She had been suspended from school several times for possession of marijuana and for stealing from and harassing other students. She was on her final probation. One day, Paula’s mother unexpectedly came home early from work to find her thirteen-year-old daughter in bed with two seventeen-year-old boys.