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 Speak, Memory (1966)

  Dmitri Nabokov (the ending in ff was an old Continental fad), State Minister of Justice from 1878 to 1885, did what he could to protect, if not to strengthen, the liberal reforms of the sixties (trial by jury, for instance) against ferocious reactionary attacks. “He acted,” says a biographer (Brockhaus’ Encyclopedia, second Russian edition), “much like the captain of a ship in a storm who would throw overboard part of the cargo in order to save the rest.” The epitaphical simile unwittingly echoes, I note, an epigraphical theme—my grandfather’s earlier attempt to throw the law out of the window.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  The estate Rozhestveno, with a large village of the same name, extensive lands, and a manor house high above the Oredezh River, on the Luga (or Warsaw) highway, in the district of Tsarskoe Selo (now Pushkin), about fifty miles south from St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), had been known before the eighteenth century as the Kurovitz domain, in the old Koporsk district. Around 1715 it had been the property of Prince Aleksey, the unfortunate son of that archbully, Peter the First. Part of an escalier dérobé and something else I cannot recollect were preserved in the new anatomy of the building. I have touched that banister and have seen (or trod on?) the other, forgotten, detail. From that palace, along that highway leading to Poland and Austria, the prince had escaped only to be lured back from as far south as Naples to the paternal torture house by the Tsar’s agent, Count Pyotr Andreevich Tolstoy, one-time ambassador in Constantinople (where he had obtained for his master the little blackamoor whose great-grandson was to be Pushkin). Rozhestveno later belonged, I believe, to a favorite of Alexander the First, and the manor had been partly rebuilt when my maternal grandfather acquired the domain around 1880, for his eldest son Vladimir who died at sixteen a few years later. His brother Vasiliy inherited it in 1901 and spent there ten summers out of the fifteen that still remained to him. I particularly remember the cool and sonorous quality of the place, the checkerboard flagstones of the hall, ten porcelain cats on a shelf, a sarcophagus and an organ, the skylights and the upper galleries, the colored dusk of mysterious rooms, and carnations and crucifixes everywhere. 3In his youth Carl Heinrich Graun had a fine tenor voice; one night, having to sing in an opera written by Schurmann, chapel-master of Brunswick, he got so disgusted with some airs in it that he replaced them by others of his own composition. Here I feel the shock of gleeful kinship; yet I prefer two other ancestors of mine, the young explorer already mentioned and that great pathologist, my mother’s maternal grandfather, Nikolay Illarionovich Kozlov (1814–1889), first president of the Russian Imperial Academy of Medicine and author of such papers as “On the Development of the Idea of Disease” or “On the Coarctation of the Jugular Foramen in the Insane.” At this convenient point, I may as well mention my own scientific papers, and especially my three favorite ones, “Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae” (Psyche, Vol. 52, Nos. 1–2 and 3–4, 1945), “A New Species of Cyclargus Nabokov” (The Entomologist, December 1948), and “The Nearctic Members of the Genus Lycaeides Hübner” (Bulletin Mus. Comp. Zool., Harvard Coll., 1949), after which year I found it no longer physically possible to combine scientific research with lectures, belles-lettres, and Lolita (for she was on her way—a painful birth, a difficult baby).

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  After that I was punished by lines to learn by heart; the lines quickly grew into pages, and before the end of the first half year it was found that I knew the whole school history of England by heart, through these punishments. Another remonstrance from my father, and I was given lines of Vergil to learn. Thank God! that seemed worth learning and the story of Ulysses and Dido on “the wild sea-banks” became a series of living pictures to me, not to be dimmed even, so long as I live. That English school for a year and a half was to me a brutal prison with stupid daily punishments. At the end of that time I was given a seat by myself, thanks to the Mathematical master; but that’s another story. The two or three best boys of my age in England were far more advanced than I was in Latin and had already waded through half the Greek Grammar, which I had not begun, but I was better in Mathematics than any one in the whole lower school. Because I was behind the English standard in languages, the Form-master took me to be stupid and called me “stupid”, and as a result I never learned a Latin or Greek lesson in my two and a half years in the Grammar School. Nevertheless, thanks to the punishment of having to learn Vergil and Livy by heart, I was easily the best of my age in Latin too, before the second year was over. I had an extraordinary verbal memory. The Doctor, I remember, once mouthed out some lines of the “Paradise Lost” and told us in his pompous way that Lord Macaulay knew the “Paradise Lost” by heart from beginning to end. I asked: “Is that hard, Sir!” “When you’ve learned half of it”, he replied, “you’ll understand how hard! Lord Macaulay was a genius”, and he emphasized the “Lord” again. A week later when the Doctor again took the school in literature, I said at the end of the hour: “Please, Sir, I know the ‘Paradise Lost’ by heart”; he tested me and I remember how he looked at me afterwards from head to foot as if asking himself where I had put all the learning. This “piece of impudence”, as the older boys called it, brought me several cuffs and kicks from boys in the Sixth, and much ill-will from many of the others. All English school life was summed up for me in the “fagging.” There was “fagging” in the Royal School in Armagh, but it was kindly. If you wanted to get out of it for a long walk with a chum, you had only to ask one of the Sixth and you got permission to skip it.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  At this time, curiously enough, Kate Stevens was by way of being engaged to Ned Bancroft; but already it was plain that she was in love with Smith and my outspoken admiration of Smith helped her, I hope, as I am sure it helped him, to a better mutual understanding. Bancroft accepted the situation with extraordinary self-sacrifice, losing neither Smith’s nor Kate’s friendship: I have seldom seen nobler self-abnegation: indeed his high-mindedness in this crisis was what first won my admiration and showed me his other fine qualities. Almost in the beginning I had serious disquietude: every little while Smith was ill and had to keep his bed for a day or two. There was no explanation of this illness which puzzled me and caused me a certain anxiety. One day in mid-winter there was a new development. Smith was in doubt how to act and confided in me. He had found Professor Kellogg, in whose house he lived, trying to kiss the pretty help, Rose, entirely against her will: Smith was emphatic on this point, the girl was struggling angrily to free herself, when by chance he interrupted them. I relieved Smith’s solemn gravity a little by roaring with laughter: the idea of an old Professor and clergyman trying to win a young girl by force filled me with amusement: “What a fool the man must be!” was my English judgment; Smith took the American high moral tone at first. “Think of his disloyalty to his wife in the same house”, he cried, “and then the scandal if the girl talked and she’s sure to talk!” “Sure not to talk”, I corrected, “girls are afraid of the effect of such revelations; besides a word from you asking her to shield Mrs. Kellogg will ensure her silence.” “Oh, I cannot advise her”, cried Smith, “I will not be mixed up in it: I told Kellogg at the time, I must leave the house, yet I don’t know where to go! It’s too disgraceful of him! His wife is really a dear woman!” For the first time I became conscious of a rooted difference between Smith and myself: his high moral condemnation on very insufficient data seemed to me childish; but no doubt many of my readers will think my tolerance a proof of my shameless libertinism! However I jumped at the opportunity of talking to Rose on such a scabrous matter and at the same time solved Smith’s difficulty by proposing that he should come and take room and board with the Gregorys—a great stroke of practical diplomacy on my part, or so it appeared to me; for thereby I did the Gregorys, Smith and myself an immense, an incalculable service. Smith jumped at the idea, asked me to see about it at once and let him know and then rang for Rose.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  A day or two afterwards we had made friends and a little later, Reece got me measured for two pairs of cord-breeches and had promised to teach me how to ride. They were cowpunchers, he said, with his strong English accent and were going down to the Rio Grande to buy cattle and drive ’em back to market here or in Kansas City. Cattle, it appeared, could be bought in South Texas for a dollar a head or less and fetched from fifteen to twenty dollars each in Chicago. “Of course we don’t always get through unscathed” Reece remarked, “The Plain Indians—Cherokees, Blackfeet and Sioux—take care of that; but one herd in two gets through and that pays big.” I found they had brought up a thousand head of cattle from their ranch near Eureka, Kansas and a couple of hundred head of horses. To cut a long story short, Reece fascinated me: he told me that Chihuahua was the Mexican province just across the Rio Grande from Texas and at once, I resolved to go on the Trail with these cowpunchers if they’d take me. In two or three days Reece told me I shaped better at riding than anyone he had ever seen, though, he added “when I saw your thick short legs I thought you’d never make much of a hand at it.” But I was strong and had grown nearly six inches in my year in the States and I turned in my toes as Reece directed and hung on to the English saddle by the grip of my knees till I was both tired and sore. In a fortnight Reece made me put five cent pieces between my knees and the saddle and keep them there when galloping or trotting. This practice soon made a rider of me so far as the seat was concerned and I had already learned that Reece was a past-master in the deeper mysteries of the art for he told me he used to ride colts in the hunting field in England and “that’s how you learn to know horses” he added significantly. One day I found out that Dell knew some poetry, literature too, and economics and that won me completely; when I asked them would they take me with them as a cowboy, they told me I’d have to ask the Boss, but there was no doubt he’d consent, and he consented, after one sharp glance.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Lorde never grappled with only one aspect of identity. She was as concerned with class, gender, and sexuality as she was with race. She held these concerns and did so with care because she valued community and the diversity of the people who were part of any given community. She valued the differences between us as strengths rather than weaknesses. Doing this was of particular urgency, because to her mind, “The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference.” But how do you best represent a significant, in all senses of the word, body of work? This is the question that has consumed me as I assembled this Audre Lorde reader. Lorde is a towering figure in the world of letters, at least for me. I first encountered her writing in my early twenties, as a young black queer woman. She was the first writer I ever read who lived and loved the way I did and also looked like me. She was a beacon, a guiding light. And she was far more than that because her prose and poetry astonished me—intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible. When I read her books, I underlined and annotated avidly. I whispered her intimately crafted turns of phrase, enjoying the sound and feel of them in my mouth, on my tongue. Lorde was the first writer who actively demonstrated for me that a writer could be intensely concerned with the inner and outer lives of black queer women, that our experiences could be the center instead of relegated to the periphery. She wrote beyond the white gaze and imagined a black reality that did not subvert itself to the cultural norms dictated by whiteness. She valorized the body as much as she valorized the mind. She valorized nurturing as much as she valorized holding people accountable for their actions, calling out people and practices that decentered the black queer woman’s experience and knowledge. Most importantly, she prioritized the collective because, “without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.” As a reader, it is gratifying to see the legacy Lorde has created and to see the genealogy of her work in the writing of the women who have followed in her footsteps.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  The Rukavishnikov blazon is more modest, but also less conventional than the Nabokov one. The escutcheon is a stylized version of a domna (primitive blast furnace), in allusion, no doubt, to the smelting of the Uralian ores that my adventurous ancestors discovered. I wish to note that these Rukavishnikovs—Siberian pioneers, gold prospectors and mining engineers—were not related, as some biographers have carelessly assumed, to the no less wealthy Moscow merchants of the same name. My Rukavishnikovs belonged (since the eighteenth century) to the landed gentry of Kazan Province. Their mines were situated at Alopaevsk near Nizhni-Tagilsk, Province of Perm, on the Siberian side of the Urals. My father had twice traveled there on the former Siberian Express, a beautiful train of the Nord-Express family, which I planned to take soon, though rather on an entomological than mineralogical trip, but the revolution interfered with that project. My mother, Elena Ivanovna (August 29, 1876—May 2, 1939), was the daughter of Ivan Vasilievich Rukavishnikov (1841–1901), landowner, justice of the peace, and philanthropist, son of a millionaire industrialist, and Olga Nikolaevna (1845–1901), daughter of Dr. Kozlov. My mother’s parents both died of cancer within the same year, he in March, she in June. Of her seven siblings, five died in infancy, and of her two older brothers, Vladimir died at sixteen at Davos, in the eighteen-eighties, and Vasiliy in Paris, in 1916. Ivan Rukavishnikov had a terrible temper and my mother feared him. In my childhood all I knew about him were his portraits (his beard, the magisterial chain around his neck) and such attributes of his main hobby as decoy ducks and elk heads. A pair of especially large bears he had shot stood upright with redoubtably raised front paws in the iron-barred vestibule of our country house. Every summer I gauged my height by the ability to reach their fascinating claws—first those of the lower forelimbs, then those of the upper. Their bellies proved disappointingly hard, once your fingers (accustomed to palpate live dogs or toy animals) had sunk in their rough brown fur. Now and then they used to be taken out into a corner of the garden to be thoroughly whacked and aired, and poor Mademoiselle, approaching from the direction of the park, would utter a cry of alarm as she caught sight of two savage beasts waiting for her in the mobile shade of the trees. My father cared nothing for the shooting of game, greatly differing in this respect from his brother Sergey, a passionate sportsman who since 1908 was Master of the Hounds to His Majesty the Tsar.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  In fact, we know that in Ephesus there was a very old man named John who held a very special position. In the days of the early Church, there was a churchman called Papias who lived from about AD 6o to 13o. He had a passion for collecting all the information he could lay hands on about the early days of the Church. He was not a great scholar. The fourth-century Church historian Eusebius dismisses him as `a man of very limited intelligence'; but he does transmit to us some most interesting information. He became Bishop of Hierapolis, but he had a close connection with Ephesus, and he tells us of his own methods of acquiring information. He frequently uses elder in the sense of one of the fathers of the Church, and he mentions a particularly distinguished elder whose name was John. `I shall not hesitate', he writes, `to put down for you, along with my own interpretations, whatsoever things I have at any time learned carefully from the elders, and carefully remembered, guaranteeing their truth. For I did not, like the multitude, take pleasure in those that speak much, but in those that teach the truth; not in those who relate strange commandments, but in those who deliver the commandments given by the Lord to faith, and springing from the truth itself. If, then, anyone came who had been a follower of the elders, I questioned him in regard to the words of the elders - what Andrew, or what Peter, had said, or what was said by Philip, or by Thomas, or by James, or by John, or by Matthew, or by any other of the disciples of the Lord; and what things Aristion, or the Elder John say. For I did not think that what was to be learned from books would profit me as much as what came from the living and abiding voice.' Clearly, the Elder John, John who had reached a great age, was a notable figure in Ephesus, although he is clearly distinguished from John the apostle. It must be this John who wrote these two little letters. By this time, he was an old man, one of the last surviving links with Jesus and his disciples. He was a man who had the authority of a bishop in Ephesus and in the places around it; and, when he saw that a church was threatened with trouble and heresy, he wrote with gracious and loving correction to his people. Here are the letters of one of the last of the first generation of Christians, a man whom all loved and respected. Common Authorship

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Vladislav Hodasevich used to complain, in the twenties and thirties, that young émigré poets had borrowed their art form from him while following the leading cliques in modish angoisse and soul-reshaping. I developed a great liking for this bitter man, wrought of irony and metallic-like genius, whose poetry was as complex a marvel as that of Tyutchev or Blok. He was, physically, of a sickly aspect, with contemptuous nostrils and beetling brows, and when I conjure him up in my mind he never rises from the hard chair on which he sits, his thin legs crossed, his eyes glittering with malevolence and wit, his long fingers screwing into a holder the half of a Caporal Vert cigarette. There are few things in modern world poetry comparable to the poems of his Heavy Lyre, but unfortunately for his fame the perfect frankness he indulged in when voicing his dislikes made him some terrible enemies among the most powerful critical coteries. Not all the mystagogues were Dostoevskian Alyoshas; there were also a few Smerdyakovs in the group, and Hodasevich’s poetry was played down with the thoroughness of a revengeful racket.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  Accordingly they went up and cast the Just down. And they said to one another: `Let us stone James the Just', and they began to stone him, since he was not killed by the fall, but he turned and knelt down saying: `I beseech thee, Lord God Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' And so, as they were stoning him, one of the Priests of the sons of Rechab, the son of Rechabim, mentioned by Jeremiah the prophet, cried out saying: `Stop! what are ye doing? The Just prays for you.' And a certain one of them, one of the fullers, taking the club with which he pounds clothes, brought it down on the head of the Just; and so he suffered martyrdom. And they buried him there on the spot, near the Temple. A true witness has he become both to Jews and Greeks that Jesus is Christ. And immediately Vespasian besieges them. The last sentence shows that Hegesippus had a different date for the death of James. Josephus makes it AD 62; but, if this happened just before the siege of Vespasian, the date is perhaps about AD 66. Much in the story of Hegesippus may well be legendary; but, from it, two things emerge. First, it is again evidence that James died a martyr's death. Second, it is evidence that, even after James became a Christian, he remained in complete loyalty to the orthodox Jewish law, so loyal that the Jews regarded him as one of themselves. This would fit well with what we have already noted of James' attitude to Paul when he came to Jerusalem with the collection for the Jerusalem church (Acts 21:18-25). The Brother of our Lord There is one other question about the person of James which we must try to solve. In Galatians Paul speaks of him as the Lord's brother. In Matthew 13:55 and in Mark 6:3, he is named among the brothers of Jesus; and in Acts 1: 14, although no names are given, the brothers of Jesus are said to be among his followers in the earliest Church. The question of the meaning of brother is one which must be faced, for the Roman Catholic Church in particular attaches a great deal of importance to the answer. Ever since the time of Jerome, there has been continuous argument in the Church on this question. There are three theories of the relationship of these `brothers' to Jesus, and we shall consider them one by one. The Hieronymian Theory

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  And if I hear a friend describe a certain family as having blotting-paper voices, the image, though immediately felt to be apposite, baffles the utmost powers of analysis. The higher poets all use abrupt epithets, which are alike intimate and remote, and, as Emerson says, sweetly torment us with invitations to their inaccessible homes. In these latter instances we must suppose that there is an identical portion in the similar objects, and that its brain-tract is energetically operative, without, however, being sufficiently isolable in its activity as to stand out per se, and form the condition of a distinctly discriminated 'abstract idea.' We cannot even by careful search see the bridge over which we passed from the heart of one representation of that of the next. In some brains, however, this mode of transition is extremely common. It would be one of the most important of physiological discoveries could we assign the mechanical or chemical difference which makes the thoughts of one brain cling close to impartial redintegration, while those of another shoot about in all the lawless revelry of similarity. Why, in these latter brains, action should tend to focalize itself in small spots, while in the others it fills patiently its broad bed, it seems impossible to guess. Whatever the difference may be, it is what separates the man of genius from the prosaic creature of habit and routine thinking. In Chapter XXII we shall need to recur again to this point. ASSOCIATION IN VOLUNTARY THOUGHT. Hitherto we have assumed the process of suggestion of one object by another to be spontaneous. The train of imagery wanders at its own sweet will, now trudging in sober grooves of habit, now with a hop, skip, and jump darting across the whole field of time and space. This is revery, or musing; but great segments of the flux of our ideas consist of something very different from this. They are guided by a distinct purpose or conscious interest. As the Germans say, we nachdenken, or think towards a certain end. It is now necessary to examine what modification is made in the trains of our imagery by the having of an end in view. The course of our ideas is then called voluntary. Physiologically considered, we must suppose that a purpose means the persistent activity of certain rather definite brain-processes throughout the whole course of thought. Our most usual cogitations are not pure reveries, absolute driftings, but revolve about some central interest or topic to which most of the images are relevant, and towards which we return promptly after occasional digressions. This interest is subserved by the persistently active brain-tracts we have supposed.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  We go through the world, carrying on the two functions abreast, discovering differences in the like, and likenesses in the different. To abstract the ground of either difference or likeness (where it is not ultimate) demands and analysis of the given objects into their parts. So that all that was said of the dependence of analysis upon a preliminary separate acquaintance with the character to be abstracted, and upon its having varied concomitants, finds a place in the psychology of resemblance as well as in that of difference. But when all is said and done about the conditions which favor our perception of resemblance and our abstraction of its ground, the crude fact remains, that some people are far more sensitive to resemblances, and far more ready to point out wherein they consist, than others are. They are the wits, the poets, the inventors, the scientific men, the practical geniuses. A native talent for perceiving analogies is reckoned by Prof. Bain, and by others before and after him, as the leading fact in genius of every order. But as this chapter is already long, and as the question of genius had better wait till Chapter XXII, where its practical consequences can be discussed at the same time, I will say nothing more at present either about it or about the faculty of noting resemblances. If the reader feels that this faculty is having small justice done it at my hands, and that it ought to be wondered at and made much more of than has been done in these last few pages, he will perhaps find some compensation when that later chapter is reached. I think I emphasize it enough when I call it one of the ultimate foundation-pillars of the intellectual life, the others being Discrimination, Retentiveness, and Association. THE MAGNITUDE OF DIFFERENCES. On page 326 I spoke of differences being greater or less, and of certain groups of them being susceptible of a linear arrangement exhibiting serial increase. A series whose terms grow more and more different from the starting point is one whose terms grow less and less like it. They grow more and more like it if you read them the other way. So that likeness and unlikeness to the starting point are functions inverse to each other, of the position of any term in such a series. Professor Stumpf introduces the word distance to denote the position of a term in any such series. The less like is the term, the more distant it is from the starting point. The ideally regular series of this sort would be one in which the distances—the steps of resemblance or difference—between all pairs of adjacent terms were equal. This would be an evenly gradated series. And it is an interesting fact in psychology that we are able, in many departments of our sensibility, to arrange the terms without difficulty in this evenly gradated way.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  We are all seeing flies, moths, and beetles by the thousand, but to whom, save an entomologist, do they say anything distinct? On the other hand, a thing met only once in a lifetime may leave an indelible experience in the memory. Let four men make a tour in Europe. One will bring home only picturesque impressions—costumes and colors, parks and views and works of architecture, pictures and statues. To another all this will be non-existent; and distances and prices, populations and drainage-arrangements, door-and window-fastenings, and other useful statistics will take their place. A third will give a rich account of the theatres, restaurants, and public balls, and naught beside; whilst the fourth will perhaps have been so wrapped in his own subjective broodings as to tell little more than a few names of places through which he passed. Each has selected, out of the same mass of presented objects, those which suited his private interest and has made his experience thereby. If, now, leaving the empirical combination of objects, we ask how the mind proceeds rationally to connect them, we find selection again to be omnipotent. In a future chapter we shall see that all Reasoning depends on the ability of the mind to break up the totality of the phenomenon reasoned about, into parts, and to pick out from among these the particular one which, in our given emergency, may lead to the proper conclusion. Another predicament will need another conclusion, and require another element to be picked out. The man of genius is he who will always stick in his bill at the right point, and bring it out with the right element—'reason' if the emergency be theoretical, 'means' if it be practical—transfixed upon it. I here confine myself to this brief statement, but it may suffice to show that Reasoning is but another form of the selective activity of the mind. If now we pass to its æsthetic department, our law is still more obvious. The artist notoriously selects his items, rejecting all tones, colors, shapes, which do not harmonize with each other and with the main purpose of his work. That unity, harmony, 'convergence of characters,' as M. Taine calls it, which gives to works of art their superiority over works of nature, is wholly due to elimination. Any natural subject will do, if the artist has wit enough to pounce upon some one feature of it as characteristic, and suppress all merely accidental items which do not harmonize with this. Ascending, still higher, we reach the plane of Ethics, where choice reigns notoriously supreme. An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible. To sustain the arguments for the good course and keep them ever before us, to stifle our longing for more flowery ways, to keep the foot unflinchingly on the arduous path, these are characteristic ethical energies.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The conditio sine quâ non of sustained attention to a given topic of thought is that we should roll it over and over incessantly and consider different aspects and relations of it in turn. Only in pathological states will a fixed and ever monotonously recurring idea possess the mind. And now we can see why it is that what is called sustained attention is the easier, the richer in acquisitions and the fresher and more original the mind. In such minds, subjects bud and sprout and grow At every moment, they please by a new consequence and rivet the attention afresh. But an intellect unfurnished with materials, stagnant, unoriginal, will hardly be likely to consider any subject long. A glance exhausts its possibilities of interest. Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention. [343] In most of them, it is to be feared, the so-called 'power' is of the passive sort. Their ideas coruscate, every subject branches infinitely before their fertile minds, and so for hours they may be rapt. But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them. And, when we come down to the root of the matter, we see that they differ from ordinary men less in the character of their attention than in the nature of the objects upon which it is successively bestowed. In the genius, these form a concatenated series, suggesting each other mutually by some rational law. Therefore we call the attention 'sustained' and the topic of meditation for hours 'the same.' In the common man the series is for the most part incoherent, the objects have no rational bond, and we call the attention wandering and unfixed. It is probable that genius tends actually to prevent a man from acquiring habits of voluntary attention, and that moderate intellectual endowments are the soil in which we may best expect, here as elsewhere, the virtues of the will, strictly so called, to thrive. But, whether the attention come by grace of genius or by dint of will, the longer one does attend to a topic the more mastery of it one has. And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it is easier to define this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about. The only general pedagogic maxim bearing on attention is that the more interest the child has in advance in the subject, the better he will attend.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  With what tender admiration do we con over our own little deed of benevolence! our own frailties and misdemeanors, how ready we are to acquit ourselves for them, when we notice them at all, on the ground of 'extenuating circumstances'! How much more really comic are our own jokes than those of others, which, unlike ours, will not bear being repeated ten or twelve times over! How eloquent, striking, powerful, our own speeches are! How appropriate our own address! In short, how much more intelligent, soulful, better, is everything about us than in anyone else. The sad chapter of artists' and authors' conceit and vanity belongs here. "The prevalence of this obvious preference which we feel for everything of our own is indeed striking. Does it not look as if our dear Ego must first lend its color and flavor to anything in order to make it please us? . . . Is it not the simplest explanation for all these phenomena, so consistent among themselves, to suppose that the Ego, the self, which forms the origin and centre of our thinking life, is at the same time the original and central object of our life of feeling, and the ground both of whatever special ideas and of whatever special feelings ensue?" Herr Horwicz goes on to refer to what we have already noticed, that various things which disgust us in others do not disgust us at all in ourselves. "To most of us even the bodily warmth of another, for example the chair warm from another's sitting, is felt unpleasantly, whereas there is nothing disagreeable in the warmth of the chair in which we have been sitting ourselves." After some further remarks, he replies to these facts and reasonings as follows: "We may with confidence affirm that our own possessions in most cases please us better [not because they are ours], but simply because we know them better, 'realize' them more intimately, feel them more deeply. We learn to appreciate what is ours in all its details and shadings, whilst the goods of others appear to us in coarse outlines and rude averages. Here are some examples: A piece of music which one plays one's self is heard and understood better than when it is played by another. We get more exactly all the details, penetrate more deeply into the musical thought. We may meanwhile perceive perfectly well that the other person is the better performer, and yet nevertheless—at times get more enjoyment from our own playing because it brings the melody and harmony so much nearer home to us.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Everyone expected that Barker would second this proposal; but while he was rising, Judge Stevens began to speak. “I desire”, he said, “to second that proposal; and I think I ought to explain why I subjected Mr. Harris to a severe examination in open court. Since I came to Kansas from the State of New York twenty-five years ago, I have been asked a score of times to examine one candidate or another. I always refused: I did not wish to punish Western candidates by putting them against our Eastern standards. But here at long last appears a candidate who has won honor in the University to whom, therefore, a stiff examination in open court can only be a vindication, and accordingly I examined Mr. Harris as if he had been in the State of New York; for surely Kansas too has come of age and its inhabitants cannot wish to be humored as inferiors. “This whole affair”, he went on, “reminds me of a story told in the east of a dog-fancier. The father lived by breeding and training bull-dogs. One day he got an extraordinarily promising pup and the father and son used to hunker down, shake their arms at the pup and thus encourage him to seize hold of their coat-sleeves and hang on. While engaged in this game once, the bull-pup, grown bold by constant praise, sprang up and seized the father by the nose. Instinctively the old man began to choke him off but the son exclaimed: “‘Don’t, father, don’t, for God’s sake! it may be hard on you, but it’ll be the making of the pup’. So my examination, I thought, might be hard on Mr. Harris; but it would be the making of him.” The Court roared and I applauded merrily. Judge Stevens continued: “I desire, however, to show myself not an enemy but a friend of Mr. Harris whom I have known for some years. Mr. Hutchings evidently thinks that Mr. Harris must wait two years in order to become a citizen of the United States. I am glad from my reading of the Statute laws of my country to be able to assure him that Mr. Harris need not wait a day. The law says that if a minor has lived three years in any state, he may on coming of age choose to become a citizen of the United States, and if Mr. Harris chooses to be one of us, he can be admitted at once as a citizen and if your Honor approve, be allowed also to practice law tomorrow.”

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  (i) Tertullian thought that Barnabas wrote it. Barnabas was a native of Cyprus; the people of Cyprus were famous for the excellence of the Greek they spoke; and Hebrews is written in the best Greek in the New Testament. Barnabas was a Levite (Acts 4:36) and, of all people in the New Testament, he would have had the closest knowledge of the priestly and sacrificial system on which the whole thought of the letter is based. He is called a son of encouragement; the Greek word is paraklesis; and Hebrews calls itself a word of paraklesis (13:22). He was one of the few people acceptable to both Jews and Greeks and at home in both worlds of thought. It might be that Barnabas wrote this letter; but, if so, it is strange that his name should vanish in connection with it. (2) Luther was sure that Apollos was the author. Apollos, according to the New Testament mention of him, was a Jew, born at Alexandria, an eloquent man and well versed in the Scriptures (Acts 18:24ff.; i Corinthians 1:12, 3:4). The person who wrote this letter knew the Scriptures, was eloquent, and thought and argued in the way that a cultured Alexandrian would. The person who wrote Hebrews was certainly someone like Apollos in thought and in background. (3) The most romantic of all conjectures is that of Adolf von Harnack, the great German scholar. He thought that maybe Aquila and Priscilla wrote it between them. Aquila was a teacher (Acts 18:26). Their house in Rome was a church in itself (Romans 16:5). Harnack thought that that is why the letter begins with no greetings and why the writer's name has vanished - because the main author of Hebrews was a woman, and a woman was not allowed to teach. But, when we come to the end of conjecture, we are compelled to say, as Origen said i,8oo years ago, that only God knows who wrote Hebrews. To us, the author must remain a voice and nothing more; but we can be thankful to God for the work of this great nameless individual who wrote with incomparable skill and beauty about the Jesus who is the way to reality and the way to God. 17James An Early Christian SermonJames is one of the books which had a very hard fight to get into the New Testament. Even when it did come to be regarded as Scripture, it was spoken of with a certain reserve and suspicion, and even as late as the sixteenth century the reformer Martin Luther would gladly have banished it from the New Testament altogether. The Doubts of the Early Christian Fathers

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  For many Christian people, the Gospel according to St John is the most precious book in the New Testament. It is the book on which above all they feed their minds and nourish their hearts, and in which they rest their souls. Very often on stained-glass windows and the like, the gospel writers are represented in symbol by the figures of the four animals that the writer of the Revelation saw around the throne (Revelation 4:7). The emblems are variously distributed among the gospel writers, but a common allocation is that the man stands for Mark, which is the plainest, the most straightforward and the most human of the gospels; the lion stands for Matthew, for he specially saw Jesus as the Messiah and the Lion of the tribe of Judah; the ox stands for Luke, because it is the animal of service and sacrifice, and Luke saw Jesus as the great servant of men and women and the universal sacrifice for all people; and the eagle stands for John, because it alone of all living creatures can look straight into the sun and not be dazzled, and, of all the New Testament writers, John has the most penetrating gaze into the eternal mysteries and the eternal truths and the very mind of God. Many people find themselves closer to God and to Jesus Christ in John than in any other book in the world. The Gospel that is Different But we have only to read the Fourth Gospel in the most cursory way to see that it is quite different from the other three. It omits so many things that they include. The Fourth Gospel has no account of the birth of Jesus, of his baptism, of his temptations; it tells us nothing of the Last Supper, nothing of Gethsemane and nothing of the ascension. It has no word of the healing of any people possessed by devils and evil spirits. And, perhaps most surprising of all, it has none of the parable stories Jesus told which are such a priceless part of the other three gospels. In these other three gospels, Jesus speaks either in these wonderful stories or in short, epigrammatic, vivid sentences which stick in the memory. But in the Fourth Gospel, the speeches of Jesus are often a whole chapter long and are often involved, argumentative pronouncements quite unlike the pithy, unforgettable sayings of the other three. Even more surprising, the account in the Fourth Gospel of the facts of the life and ministry of Jesus is often different from that in the other three.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  We had first become aware of each other around Christmas 1904 (I was five and a half, he seven), in Wiesbaden: I remember him coming out of a souvenir shop and running toward me with a breloque, an inch-long little pistol of silver, which he was anxious to show me—and suddenly sprawling on the sidewalk but not crying when he picked himself up, unmindful of a bleeding knee and still clutching his minuscule weapon. In the summer of 1909 or 1910, he enthusiastically initiated me into the dramatic possibilities of the Mayne Reid books. He had read them in Russian (being in everything save surname much more Russian than I) and, when looking for a playable plot, was prone to combine them with Fenimore Cooper and his own fiery inventions. I viewed our games with greater detachment and tried to keep to the script. The staging took place generally in the park of Batovo, where the trails were even more tortuous and trappy than those of Vyra. For our mutual manhunts we used spring pistols that ejected, with considerable force, pencil-long sticks (from the brass tips of which we had manfully twisted off the protective rubber suction cups). Later came airguns of various types, which shot wax pellets or small tufted darts, with non-lethal, but often quite painful consequences. In 1912, the impressive mother-of-pearl plated revolver he arrived with was calmly taken away and locked up by my tutor Lenski, but not before we had blown to pieces a shoebox lid (in prelude to the real thing, an ace), which we had been holding up by turns at a gentlemanly distance in a green avenue where a duel was rumored to have been fought many dim years ago. The following summer he was away in Switzerland with his mother—and soon after his death (in 1919), upon revisiting the same hotel and getting the same rooms they had occupied that July, she thrust her hand into the recesses of an armchair in quest of a fallen hairpin and brought up a tiny cuirassier, unhorsed but with bandy legs still compressing an invisible charger.

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

  The argument brought forward in the fifth objection is not tenable. The contemplative life is superior to the active, not, merely, because it is more secure, but simply because it is better. This, our Lord’s own words point out: “Mary has chosen the better part” (Luke x. 43). And in so far as contemplation is superior to activity, so much the more would he seem to do for God, who, at the expense of his much loved contemplation, devotes himself, for God’s sake, to his neighbour’s salvation. Hence, it is a proof of a greater perfection of charity, to be willing, for the love of God and of our neighbour, to labour for the salvation of others, even though, by so doing, contemplation be somewhat impaired, than to cleave so closely to the sweetness of contemplation as to be unwilling to sacrifice it, even for the salvation of others. St. Paul was so zealous for the salvation of his brethren, that he desired, for their sake, not merely the prolongation of this present life, but also the temporary postponement of the Beatific vision. His own words to the Philippians (i. 23) are a proof of his disposition. “I am straitened,” he says, “between two: having a desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ, a thing by far the better. But to abide still in the flesh, is needful for you.” If by perfection of charity we mean (according to the teaching of St. Augustine), preparation of heart, many who lead a contemplative life have attained to a degree of charity not found in some who are entirely occupied in labouring for the salvation of their neighbour. For, many contemplatives are ready, in order to please God, to suspend for a time their cherished contemplation, in order to devote themselves to the welfare of their brethren. Whereas, those who are busied in exterior works, are often led to engage in them, rather from the tedium which they experience in contemplation, than from the desire of attaining to the fulness of divine love, which would induce them to lay aside for a time that contemplation which is their delight. But, the faults of individuals do not detract from the merit of any state or office; and care for the salvation of others must always be esteemed an act of perfection, since it pertains to the love, both of God, and of our neighbour.