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 Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation (2014)

  Despite how Renay has been (mis) categorized historically along the sexual continuum, Shockley creates a protagonist who is a black same-gender loving woman. That alone certainly is radical and groundbreaking, especially given the sociocultural and political contexts out of which she emerged. Shockley foregrounds interracial same-gender loving and homosexuality in her novel during the Black Power/Black Arts movement, when black writers were expected to espouse and inscribe black aesthetics in their works: to qualify for "blackness" meant to promote black consciousness, racial loyalty, and unquestioned solidarity.30 Moreover, she foregrounds a black same-gender loving protagonist during the gay rights movement and, in so doing, confronts and destabilizes representations-propagated by gay liberationists-that conflate homosexuality and same-sex desire with whiteness and (upper) middle-class status. Equally consequential, Shockley engages interracial samegender loving, which also frustrates particular black feminist conceptualizations and paradigms of black women loving other black women. And so, as Alice Walker asserts in her laconic 1975 review of the novel, Loving Her "has immense value. It enables us to see and understand, perhaps for the first time, the choices certain women have made about how they will live their lives"; and, it "allows us glimpses at physical intimacies between women that have been, in the past, deliberately ridiculed or obscured."31 This "ridicule" or deliberate "obscurity" was not merely a discursive affront from some black nationalists, white feminists, or gay liberationists, but it also came from black (lesbian) feminists who maintained a critical (dis)position with regard to interracial (same) sex relations-and "uncommon affinities," to evoke Jewelle Gomez-and representations of black lesbians in the literary and cultural imagination. Walker's remarks, though salient and apt, were written shortly after the novel's publication. With few exceptions, most reviews of Loving Her, despite the "immensity" of its value, predate 198o and are brief, antiquated, relatively inaccessible, and/or hardly scholarly or meritorious.32 Despite these historical sociocultural/political dynamics, one might ask why this seminal text has been afforded relatively little critical attention. Why has it been largely overlooked by scholars, critics, and academicians? And, more significantly, why, in the 1970s and 198os-when African American women writers were flourishing and scholars were recuperating black women authors and their texts-were Ann Allen Shockley and Loving Her still not recognized and given critical attention?

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  Ezra 7 Ezra Journeys from Babylon to Jerusalem 1 N OW AFTER this, in the reign of Artaxerxes I [son of Ahasuerus (Xerxes)] king of Persia, Ezra the son (descendant) of Seraiah, the son of Azariah, the son of Hilkiah, 2 the son of Shallum, the son of Zadok, the son of Ahitub, 3 the son of Amariah, the son of Azariah, the son of Meraioth, 4 the son of Zerahiah, the son of Uzzi, the son of Bukki, 5 the son of Abishua, the son of Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the chief priest— 6 this Ezra went up from Babylon. He was a scribe skilled in the Law (the five books) of Moses, which the LORD God of Israel had given; and the king granted him everything that he asked, for the hand of the LORD his God was on him. 7 Some of the sons of Israel, with some of the priests and Levites, the singers and gatekeepers, and the temple servants also went up [from Babylon] to Jerusalem in the seventh year of King Artaxerxes. 8 Ezra came to Jerusalem in the fifth month of the seventh year of the king. 9 For on the first of the first month he started out from Babylon, and on the first of the fifth month he arrived in Jerusalem, because the good hand of his God was on him. 10 For Ezra had set his heart (resolved) to study and interpret the Law of the LORD , and to practice it and teach His statutes and ordinances in Israel. King’s Decree on Behalf of Ezra 11 Now this is a copy of the decree that King Artaxerxes gave to Ezra the priest, the scribe [who was] learned in the words of the commandments of the LORD and of His statutes to Israel: 12 “Artaxerxes, king of kings, to Ezra the priest, the scribe of the Law of the God of heaven, perfect peace (greetings). And now 13 I have issued a decree that all of the people of Israel and their priests and the Levites in my kingdom who are willing to go to Jerusalem, may go with you. 14 “For you are sent by the king and his seven advisers to inquire about Judah and Jerusalem in accordance with the Law of your God, which is in your hand, 15 and to bring [with you] the silver and gold which the king and his advisers have freely offered to the God of Israel, whose dwelling is in Jerusalem, 16 and all the silver and gold which you find in the whole province of Babylon, along with the freewill offering of the people and of the priests for the house of their God in Jerusalem. 17 “Therefore with this money, you shall diligently buy bulls, rams, and lambs, with their grain offerings and drink offerings, and offer them on the altar of the house of your God which is in Jerusalem.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  CHAPTER 5Out: Online and IRLThe snow had been falling thick and wet all morning outside my hotel room window. Two inches. Four inches. Six. By two o’clock, everything in the midwestern college town I was visiting had shut down. Classes had been called off. No cars or buses braved the slick roads. Students from the ski and snowboard club had jury-rigged a speaker system at the top of a hill that was barely steep enough for a child to sled down, and they were giddily, somewhat tipsily, freestyling to their beats. By three o’clock dusk was settling, and all my appointments for the day had been cancelled. Except for one. Far down the street, I spotted a figure trudging in Timberland boots and a down jacket, hands jammed into pockets, shoulders hunched against the wind. I headed to the lobby, arriving just in time to catch a blast of cold air as the revolving door spun. There was the stomping of snow-covered boots, the unwrapping of a scarf from pink cheeks, the doffing of gloves. A hand extended to give mine a firm-gripped shake. “You must be Peggy.” A smile, a look squarely into my eyes. “I’m Amber McNeill.” The New Street Corner I shouldn’t have been surprised that Amber braved a blizzard to meet me. The gay girls who responded to my e-mail queries were the most insistent about being heard. “I am a young, queer woman of color,” one girl wrote to me. “We have to talk—I am your unicorn!” I received more responses than I expected from queer girls across spectrums of both ethnicity and orientation. One eighteen-year-old Korean American identified as asexual: not physically attracted to either men or women. I have to admit, that one threw me—interviewing her, I felt like I was talking to a lifelong vegan for a book on the joys of eating meat. But she wanted it on the record that hers was a legitimate sexual orientation, not arising from abuse or rejection. “I don’t recall ever feeling any other way,” she said. “I was just never interested in sex. I find it kind of . . . gross.” What’s more, she added, there is a thriving asexual community on the Internet: support groups, educational material, meetup sites.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Turning her back on the chattering Brockett, she started to talk to her guest quite gravely about her work, about books in general, about life in general; and as she did so Stephen began to understand better the charm that many had found in this woman; a charm that lay less in physical attraction than in a great courtesy and understanding, a great will to please, a great impulse towards beauty in all its forms—yes, therein lay her charm. And as they talked on it dawned upon Stephen that here was no mere libertine in love’s garden, but rather a creature born out of her epoch, a pagan chained to an age that was Christian, one who would surely say with Pierre Louÿs: ‘Le monde moderne succombe sous un envahissement de laideur.’ And she thought that she discerned in those luminous eyes, the pale yet ardent light of the fanatic. Presently Valérie Seymour asked her how long she would be remaining in Paris. And Stephen answered: ‘I’m going to live here,’ feeling surprised at the words as she said them, for not until now had she made this decision. Valérie seemed pleased: ‘If you want a house, I know of one in the Rue Jacob; it’s a tumbledown place, but it’s got a fine garden. Why not go and see it? You might go to-morrow. Of course you’ll have to live on this side, the Rive Gauche is the only possible Paris. ‘I should like to see the old house,’ said Stephen . So Valérie went to the telephone there and then and proceeded to call up the landlord. The appointment was made for eleven the next morning. ‘It’s rather a sad old house,’ she warned, ‘no one has troubled to make it a home for some time, but you’ll alter all that if you take it, because I suppose you’ll make it your home.’ Stephen flushed: ‘My home’s in England,’ she said quickly, for her thoughts had instantly flown back to Morton. But Valérie answered: ‘One may have two homes—many homes. Be courteous to our lovely Paris and give it the privilege of being your second home—it will feel very honoured, Miss Gordon.’ She sometimes made little ceremonious speeches like this, and coming from her, they sounded strangely old-fashioned. Brockett, rather subdued and distinctly pensive as sometimes happened if Valérie had snubbed him, complained of a pain above his right eye: ‘I must take some phenacetin,’ he said sadly, ‘I’m always getting this curious pain above my right eye—do you think it’s the sinus?’

• From Vox (1992)

  126 kling continent, taking in the totality of female orgasms, might seem a bit indiscriminate. The fact is, I am indis criminate. If I had called this number, and there had been a woman of extremely limited intelligence who responded to my voice, like say that one woman, Carla, who was on the line after you first came on, and she and I had entered our private code numbers and been trans ferred together into this 'back room,' and if she'd come, if I could have talked her through coming, that would have been a wonderful privilege and I would have come too and I would have hung up after twenty minutes feel ing great. But that's why talking to you seems like such a miraculous once-in-a-lifetime thing, because you are smart and funny and aroused and delightful—you are not representative. We're actually talking! If you come on this phone with me, it will be, as far as I'm con cerned, it will be the top item on Washington Week in Review, it will be bigger than anything your bearded friend who eats the meatball subs has ever experienced, it will be really something, because you get it, you un derstand, you have a complicated response to things, and, I mean, an orgasm in a complicated mind is always more interesting than one in a simple mind—maybe that's not true, maybe sometimes a simple mind is made subtler and finer as it comes, since that's the most mental activity that's gone on in there for a while—but I mean an orgasm in an intelligent woman is like a volcano in a mountain with a city built on the slope—you feel the

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

  The testimony of the catacombs, as contrasted with pagan epitaphs, shows that Christianity almost obliterated the distinction between the two classes of society. Slaves are rarely mentioned. "While it is impossible," says De Rossi, "to examine the pagan sepulchral inscriptions of the same period without finding mention of a slave or a freedman, I have not met with one well-ascertained instance among the inscriptions of the Christian tombs."627 The principles of Christianity naturally prompt Christian slave-holders to actual manumission. The number of slaveholders before Constantine was very limited among Christians, who were mostly poor. Yet we read in the Acts of the martyrdom of the Roman bishop Alexander, that a Roman prefect, Hermas, converted by that bishop, in the reign of Trajan, received baptism at an Easter festival with his wife and children and twelve hundred and fifty slaves, and on this occasion gave all his slaves their freedom and munificent gifts besides.628 So in the martyrology of St. Sebastian, it is related that a wealthy Roman prefect, Chromatius, under Diocletian, on embracing Christianity, emancipated fourteen hundred slaves, after having them baptized with himself, because their sonship with God put an end to their servitude to man.629 Several epitaphs in the catacombs mention the fact of manumission. In the beginning of the fourth century St. Cantius, Cantianus, and Cantianilla, of an old Roman family, set all their slaves, seventy-three in number, at liberty, after they had received baptism.630 St. Melania emancipated eight thousand slaves; St. Ovidius, five thousand; Hermes, a prefect in the reign of Trajan, twelve hundred and fifty.631 These legendary traditions may indeed be doubted as to the exact facts in the case, and probably are greatly exaggerated; but they, are nevertheless conclusive as the exponents of the spirit which animated the church at that time concerning the duty of Christian masters. It was felt that in a thoroughly Christianized society there can be no room for despotism on the one hand and slavery on the other. After the third century the manumission became a solemn act, which took place in the presence of the clergy and the congregation. It was celebrated on church festivals, especially on Easter. The master led the slave to the altar; there the document of emancipation was read, the minister pronounced the blessing, and the congregation received him as a free brother with equal rights and privileges. Constantine found this custom already established, and African councils of the fourth century requested the emperor to give it general force. He placed it under the superintendence of the clergy. Notes.

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

  Frederick William IV. was well versed in theology, and a pronounced evangelical believer. He wished to make the church more independent, and as a means to that end he established the Oberkirchenrath (1850, modified 1852), which in connection with the Cultusministerium should administer the affairs of the church in the name of the king; while a general synod was to exercise the legislative function. Under his reign the principle of religious liberty made great progress, and was embodied in the Prussian Constitution of 1850, which guarantees in Article XII. the freedom of conscience and of private and public worship to all religious associations.806 William I., aided by Bismarck and Moltke, raised Prussia, by superior statesmanship and diplomacy, and by brilliant victories in the wars with Austria (1866) and France (1870), to her present commanding position. He became by common consent of the German sovereigns and people the first hereditary emperor of United Germany under the lead of Prussia. He adorned this position in eighteen years of peace by his wisdom, integrity, justice, untiring industry, and simple piety, and gained the universal esteem and affection of the German nation, yea, we may say, of the civilized world, which mourned for him when on the 9th of March, 1888, in the ninety-first year of an eventful life, he entered into his rest. History has never seen a more illustrious trio than the Emperor William, "the Iron Chancellor," and "the Battle-thinker," who "feared God, and nothing else." The new German Empire with a Protestant head is the last outcome of the Reformation of Prussia, and would not have been possible without it. § 100. Protestant Martyrs. No great cause in church or state, in religion or science, has ever succeeded without sacrifice. Blood is the price of liberty. "The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christianity." Persecution develops the heroic qualities of human nature, and the passive virtues of patience and endurance under suffering. Protestantism has its martyrs as well as Catholicism. In Germany it achieved a permanent legal existence only after the Thirty Years’ War. The Reformed churches in France, Holland, England, and Scotland, passed through the fiery ordeal of persecution. It has been estimated that the victims of the Spanish Inquisition outnumber those of heathen Rome, and that more Protestants were executed by the Spaniards in a single reign, and in a single province of Holland, than Christians in the Roman empire during the first three centuries.807 Jews and heathens have persecuted Christians, Christians have persecuted Jews and heathens, Romanists have persecuted Protestants, Protestants have persecuted Romanists, and every state-church has more or less persecuted dissenters and sects. It is only within a recent period that the sacred rights of conscience have been properly appreciated, and that the line is clearly and sharply drawn between church and state, religious and civil offenses, heresy and crime, spiritual and temporal punishments.

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

  Paul defines the church as the body of Jesus Christ.744 He thus represents it as an organic living system of various members, powers, and functions, and at the same time as the abode of Christ and the organ of his redeeming and sanctifying influence upon the world. Christ is, in one view, the ruling head, in another the all-pervading soul, of this body. Christ without the church were a head without a body, a fountain without a stream, a king without subjects, a captain without soldiers, a bridegroom without a bride. The church without Christ were a body without soul or spirit—a lifeless corpse. The church lives only as Christ lives and moves and works in her. At every moment of her existence she is dependent on him, as the body on the soul, or the branches on the vine. But on his part he perpetually bestows upon her his heavenly gifts and supernatural powers, continually reveals himself in her, and uses her as his organ for the spread of his kingdom and the christianizing of the world, till all principalities and powers shall yield free obedience to him, and adore him as the eternal Prophet, Priest, and King of the regenerate race. This work must be a gradual process of history. The idea of a body, and of all organic life, includes that of development, of expansion and consolidation. And hence the same Paul speaks also of the growth and edification of the body of Christ, "till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."745 This sublime idea of the church, as developed in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, and especially in the Epistle to the Ephesians, when Paul was a prisoner chained to a heathen soldier, soars high above the actual condition of the little flocks of peasants, freedmen, slaves, and lowly, uncultured people that composed the apostolic congregations. It has no parallel in the social ideals of ancient philosophers and statesmen. It can only be traced to divine inspiration.

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

  The book of Acts is, indeed, like every impartial history, an Irenicum, but a truthful Irenicum, conceived in the very spirit of the Conference at Jerusalem and the concordat concluded by the leading apostles, according to Paul’s own testimony in the polemical Epistle to the Galatians. The principle of selection required, of course, the omission of a large number of facts and incidents. But the selection was made with fairness and justice to all sides. The impartiality and truthfulness of Luke is very manifest in his honest record of the imperfections of the apostolic church. He does not conceal the hypocrisy and mean selfishness of Ananias and Sapphira, which threatened to poison Christianity in its cradle (Acts 5:1 sqq.); he informs us that the institution of the diaconate arose from a complaint of the Grecian Jews against their Hebrew brethren for neglecting their widows in the daily ministration (61 sqq.) he represents Paul and Barnabas as "men of like passions" with other men (14:15), and gives us some specimens of weak human nature in Mark when he became discouraged by the hardship of missionary life and returned to his mother in Jerusalem (13:13), and in Paul and Barnabas when they fell out for a season on account of this very Mark, who was a cousin of Barnabas (15:39); nor does he pass in silence the outburst of Paul’s violent temper when in righteous indignation he called the high-priest a "whited wall" (23:3); and he speaks of serious controversies and compromises even among the apostles under the guidance of the Holy Spirit—all for our humiliation and warning as well as comfort and encouragement. Examine and compare the secular historians from Herodotus to Macaulay, and the church historians from Eusebius to Neander, and Luke need not fear a comparison. No history of thirty years has ever been written so truthful and impartial, so important and interesting, so healthy in tone and hopeful in spirit, so aggressive and yet so genial, so cheering and inspiring, so replete with lessons of wisdom and encouragement for work in spreading the gospel of truth and peace, and yet withal so simple and modest, as the Acts of the Apostles. It is the best as well as the first manual of church history. § 86. The Epistles. The sermons of Stephen and the apostles in Acts (excepting the farewell of Paul to the Ephesian Elders) are missionary addresses to outsiders, with a view to convert them to the Christian faith. The Epistles are addressed to baptized converts, and aim to strengthen them in their faith, and, by brotherly instruction, exhortation, rebuke, and consolation, to build up the church in all Christian graces on the historical foundation of the teaching and example of Christ. The prophets of the Old Testament delivered divine oracles to the people; the apostles of the New Testament wrote letters to the brethren, who shared with them the same faith and hope as members of Christ.

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

  From the fifth century it has been customary to reckon ten great persecutions: under Nero, Domitian, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Maximinus, Decius, Valerian, Aurelian, and Diocletian.12 This number was suggested by the ten plagues of Egypt taken as types (which, however, befell the enemies of Israel, and present a contrast rather than a parallel), and by the ten horns of the Roman beast making war with the Lamb, taken for so many emperors.13 But the number is too great for the general persecutions, and too small for the provincial and local. Only two imperial persecutions—those, of Decius and Diocletian—extended over the empire; but Christianity was always an illegal religion from Trajan to Constantine, and subject to annoyance and violence everywhere.14 Some persecuting emperors—Nero, Domitian, Galerius, were monstrous tyrants, but others—Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Decius, Diocletian—were among the best and most energetic emperors, and were prompted not so much by hatred of Christianity as by zeal for the maintenance of the laws and the power of the government. On the other hand, some of the most worthless emperors—Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus—were rather favorable to the Christians from sheer caprice. All were equally ignorant of the true character of the new religion. The Result. The long and bloody war of heathen Rome against the church, which is built upon a rock, utterly failed. It began in Rome under Nero, it ended near Rome at the Milvian bridge, under Constantine. Aiming to exterminate, it purified. It called forth the virtues of Christian heroism, and resulted in the consolidation and triumph of the new religion. The philosophy of persecution is best expressed by the terse word of Tertullian, who lived in the midst of them, but did not see the end: "The blood of the Christians is the seed of the Church." Religious Freedom. The blood of persecution is also the seed of civil and religious liberty. All sects, schools, and parties, whether religious or political, when persecuted, complain of injustice and plead for toleration; but few practise it when in power. The reason of this inconsistency lies in the selfishness of human nature, and in mistaken zeal for what it believes to be true and right. Liberty is of very slow, but sure growth. The ancient world of Greece and Rome generally was based upon the absolutism of the state, which mercilessly trampled under foot the individual rights of men. It is Christianity which taught and acknowledged them. The Christian apologists first proclaimed, however imperfectly, the principle of freedom of religion, and the sacred rights of conscience. Tertullian, in prophetic anticipation as it were of the modern Protestant theory, boldly tells the heathen that everybody has a natural and inalienable right to worship God according to his conviction, that all compulsion in matters of conscience is contrary to the very nature of religion, and that no form of worship has any value whatever except as far as it is a free voluntary homage of the heart.15

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  8 “Blessed be the LORD your God, who delighted in you, setting you on His throne as king for the LORD your God; because your God loved Israel, establishing them forever, therefore He made you king over them, to do justice and righteousness.” 9 Then she gave the king a hundred and twenty talents of gold, a very large amount of spices (balsam oil) and precious stones; there was no such spice [anywhere] like that which the queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon. 10 The servants of Huram and those of Solomon, who brought gold from Ophir, also brought almug trees and precious stones. 11 From the almug timber the king made c stairways for the house of the LORD and for the king’s palace, and lyres and harps for the singers; none like that was seen before in the land of Judah. 12 King Solomon gave to the queen of Sheba all [the things] she desired, whatever she asked, d besides a return for what she had brought to the king. So she returned to her own land with her servants. Solomon’s Wealth and Power 13 Now the weight of gold which came to Solomon in one year was 666 talents, 14 besides what the traders and merchants brought; and all the kings of Arabia and the governors of the country brought gold and silver to Solomon. 15 King Solomon made two hundred large shields of beaten gold, using six hundred shekels of beaten gold on each large shield. 16 And he made three hundred [smaller] shields of beaten gold, using three hundred shekels of gold on each shield; and the king put them in the e house of the Forest of Lebanon. 17 Moreover, the king made a great throne of ivory and overlaid it with pure gold. 18 There were six steps to the throne and a golden footstool attached to the throne, and arms on each side of the seat, with two lions standing beside the arms. 19 Also, twelve lions were standing there, one on each side of the six steps. Nothing like it had ever been made for any [other] kingdom. 20 All King Solomon’s drinking vessels were of gold, and all the vessels of the house of the Forest of Lebanon were of pure gold; silver was not considered valuable in the days of Solomon. 21 For the king’s ships went to Tarshish with the servants of Huram; once every three years the ships of Tarshish came bringing gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks. 22 So King Solomon surpassed all the kings of the earth in wealth and wisdom. 23 And all the kings of the earth were seeking the presence of Solomon, to hear his wisdom which God had put into his heart. 24 Each man brought his gift, articles of silver and gold, garments, weapons, spices, horses and mules, so much year by year.

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

  But, in the first place, the number of words peculiar to each one of the three epistles is much greater than the number of peculiar words common to all three; consequently, if the argument proves anything, it leads to the conclusion of three different authors, which the assailants will not admit, in view of the general unity of the Epistles. In the next place, every one of Paul’s Epistles has a number of peculiar words, even the little Epistle of Philemon.1207 The most characteristic words were required by the nature of the new topics handled and the heresy combated, such as "knowledge falsely so called" (yeudwvnumo" gnw'si", 1 Tim. 6:20) "healthful doctrine" (uJgiaivnousa didaskaliva, Tim. 1:10); "Jewish myths" (Tit. 1:14); "genealogies" (Tit. 3:9); "profane babblings" (2 Tim. 2:16). Paul’s mind was uncommonly fertile and capable of adapting itself to varying, conditions, and had to create in some measure the Christian idiom. The Tübingen critics profess the highest admiration for his genius, and yet would contract his vocabulary to a very small compass. Finally, the peculiarities of style are counterbalanced by stronger resemblances and unmistakable evidences of Pauline authorship. "There are flashes of the deepest feeling, outbursts of the most intense expression. There is rhythmic movement and excellent majesty in the doxologies, and the ideal of a Christian pastor drawn not only with an unfaltering hand, but with a beauty, fulness, and simplicity which a thousand years of subsequent experience have enabled no one to equal, much less to surpass."1208 On the other hand, we may well ask the opponents to give a good reason why a forger should have chosen so many new words when he might have so easily confined himself to the vocabulary of the other Epistles of Paul; why he should have added "mercy" to the salutation instead of the usual form; why he should have called Paul "the chief of sinners" (1 Tim. 1:15), and affected a tone of humility rather than a tone of high apostolic authority? Other Objections. The Epistles have been charged with want of logical connection, with abruptness, monotony, and repetitiousness, unworthy of such an original thinker and writer as Paul. But this feature is only the easy, familiar, we may say careless, style which forms the charm as well as the defect of personal correspondence. Moreover, every great author varies more or less at different periods of life, and under different conditions and moods.

• From Vox (1992)

  Naturally you can’t restore the fork to mint condition—you melt the roughnesses until they subside, and what you’re left with is a lovely irregular mottled very shiny surface. You’re glad you have your dark welder’s goggles on: you look up covertly, with just your eyes, not lifting your head, and you see the fork man standing there sort of slumped , looking at you do those things to his fork. He’s melting, he’s smitten, he’s silversmitten. You plunge the fork into a tray of water. He smiles. He goes back into the shop. You come out of your enclosure. Harvey looks up. You hand the fork to Harvey and Harvey looks at it and says, ‘Twelve dollars.’ Mr. Fork pays the twelve dollars and takes the repair job and says thank-you to Harvey. Then he says, ‘I was just curious how it was done. I’m sorry to have taken up her time.’ And then he asks, ‘You say she’s an artist. Can you show me some things she’s done?’ Slowly, slowly Harvey walks over to the display case, unlocks it, sighs. The guy leans very close to the jewelry, his head is practically in the case. You’re watching all this. You notice for the first time that he’s got his hair in a kind of ponytail. And then he points to the necklace and he says, ‘May I take a look at that?’ Harvey looks at you, he’s got this almost pleading look, but you don’t say anything. So Harvey seems to decide something, and he says sadly, ‘That’s the best thing in the store.’ And he unhooks it from its little mounts and he hands it to Mr. Forkman, who again looks closely at it, holds it up in the air. Harvey says, ‘For a fiancée or something? What’s her complexion, dark or light?’ And Forkman vagues out, saying, ‘I don’t really know who it’s for.’ Again Harvey looks at you, and you don’t say anything, and so Harvey swallows and he says, he almost whispers, ‘Really you can’t get a good sense of it unless you see it worn.’ And the fork guy says, ‘Gee, yeah, too bad.’ And he asks what the stones are and Harvey tells him and the guy just nods. Finally Harvey, almost in exasperation, says, ‘Look, she made it, she knows all about it, she’ll tell you everything you want to know, I’m going to get a bite to eat.’ He turns to you and says, ‘Show him the piece, all right?’ He grabs his jacket and goes out, pulling the door shut with unusual force, so that the sign saying OPEN flips down to say CLOSED . And so …”

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

  The Epistle is eminently Christological. It resembles in this respect Colossians and Philippians, and forms a stepping-stone to the Christology of John. From the sublime description of the exaltation and majesty of Christ in Heb. 1:1–4 (comp. Col. 1:15–20), there is only one step to the prologue of the fourth Gospel. The exposition of the high priesthood of Christ reminds one of the sacerdotal prayer (John 17). The use of proof-texts from the Old Testament seems at times contrary to the obvious historical import of the passage, but is always ingenious, and was, no doubt, convincing to Jewish readers. The writer does not distinguish between typical and direct prophecies. He recognizes the typical, or rather antitypical, character of the Tabernacle and its services, as reflecting the archetype seen by Moses in the mount, but all the Messianic prophecies are explained as direct (Heb. 1:5–14; 2:11–13; 10:5–10). He betrays throughout a high order of Greek culture, profound knowledge of the Greek Scriptures, and the symbolical import of the Mosaic worship.1213 He was also familiar with the Alexandrian theosophy of Philo,1214 but he never introduces foreign ideas into the Scriptures, as Philo did by his allegorical interpretation. His exhortations and warnings go to the quick of the moral sensibility; and yet his tone is also cheering and encouraging. He had the charisma of exhortation and consolation in the highest degree.1215 Altogether, he was a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, and gifted with a tongue of fire. The Style. Hebrews is written in purer Greek than any book of the New Testament, except those portions of Luke where he is independent of prior documents. The Epistle begins, like the third Gospel, with a rich and elegant period of classic construction. The description of the heroes of faith in the eleventh chapter is one of the most eloquent and sublime in the entire history of religious literature. He often reasons a minori ad majus (eij ... povsw/ ma'llon). He uses a number of rare and choice terms which occur nowhere else in the New Testament.1216 As compared with the undoubted Epistles of Paul, the style of Hebrews is less fiery and forcible, but smoother, more correct, rhetorical, rhythmical, and free from anacolutha and solecisms. There is not that rush and vehemence which bursts through ordinary rules, but a calm and regular flow of speech. The sentences are skilfully constructed and well rounded. Paul is bent exclusively on the thought; the author of Hebrews evidently paid great attention to the form. Though not strictly classical, his style is as pure as the Hellenistic dialect and the close affinity with the Septuagint permit. All these considerations exclude the idea of a translation from a supposed Hebrew original. The Readers.

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

  with men, and subjugated only their bodies; their descendants undertook to strive with devils, and to conquer souls .... God called them to be the ancestors of a new people, gave them a new empire to found, and permitted them to bury and transfigure the glory of their forefathers in the bosom of the spiritual regeneration of the world."362 Most of these distinguished patrician converts of Jerome were women—such widows as Marcella, Albinia, Furia, Salvina, Fabiola, Melania, and the most illustrious of all, Paula, and her family; or virgins, as Eustochium, Apella, Marcellina, Asella, Felicitas, and Demetrias. He gathered them as a select circle around him; he expounded to them the Holy Scriptures, in which some of these Roman ladies were very well read; he answered their questions of conscience; he incited them to celibate life, lavish beneficence, and enthusiastic asceticism; and flattered their spiritual vanity by extravagant praises. He was the oracle, biographer, admirer, and eulogist of these holy women, who constituted the spiritual nobility of Catholic Rome. Even the senator Pammachius, son in-law to Paula and heir to her fortune, gave his goods to the poor, exchanged the purple for the cowl, exposed himself to the mockery of his colleagues, and became, in the flattering language of Jerome, the general in chief of Roman monks, the first of monks in the first of cities.363 Jerome considered second marriage incompatible with genuine holiness; even depreciated first marriage, except so far as it was a nursery of brides of Christ; warned Eustochium against all intercourse with married women; and hesitated not to call the mother of a bride of Christ, like Paula, a "mother-in-law of God."364 His intimacy with these distinguished women, whom he admired more, perhaps, than they admired him, together with his unsparing attacks upon the immoralities of the Roman clergy and of the higher classes, drew upon him much unjust censure and groundless calumny, which he met rather with indignant scorn and satire than with quiet dignity and Christian meekness. After the death of his patron Damasus, A.D. 384, he left Rome, and in August, 385, with his brother Paulinian, a few monks, Paula, and her daughter Eustochium, made a pilgrimage "from Babylon to Jerusalem, that not Nebuchadnezzar, but Jesus, should reign over him." With religious devotion and inquiring mind he wandered through the holy places of Palestine, spent some time in Alexandria, where he heard the lectures of the celebrated Didymus; visited the cells of the Nitrian mountain; and finally, with his two female friends, in 386, settled in the birthplace of the Redeemer, to lament there, as he says, the sins of his youth, and to secure himself against others.

• From Vox (1992)

  “All that is somewhat indiscriminate of you, you know. You’re using me as a proxy for all women who are masturbating at this very moment.” “Well, that may have been the original motive for calling this number, but I have never talked like this to any woman before. You’re right, though, I can see that the idea of me suspended ten miles up over a dark twinkling continent, taking in the totality of female orgasms, might seem a bit indiscriminate. The fact is, I am indiscriminate. If I had called this number, and there had been a woman of extremely limited intelligence who responded to my voice, like say that one woman, Carla, who was on the line after you first came on, and she and I had entered our private code numbers and been transferred together into this ‘back room,’ and if she’d come, if I could have talked her through coming, that would have been a wonderful privilege and I would have come too and I would have hung up after twenty minutes feeling great. But that’s why talking to you seems like such a miraculous once-in-a-lifetime thing, because you are smart and funny and aroused and delightful—you are not representative. We’re actually talking! If you come on this phone with me, it will be, as far as I’m concerned, it will be the top item on Washington Week in Review , it will be bigger than anything your bearded friend who eats the meatball subs has ever experienced, it will be really something , because you get it, you understand, you have a complicated response to things, and, I mean, an orgasm in a complicated mind is always more interesting than one in a simple mind—maybe that’s not true, maybe sometimes a simple mind is made subtler and finer as it comes, since that’s the most mental activity that’s gone on in there for a while—but I mean an orgasm in an intelligent woman is like a volcano in a mountain with a city built on the slope—you feel the alternative opportunity cost of her orgasm, you feel the force of all the other perceptive things she could be thinking at that moment and is not thinking because she is coming, and they enrich it. You still there?” “I’m just trying to feel my wrist tendon,” she said, “to see what it might have felt like for you. Actually, you know, there is a little muscle high up on the outside of my forearm that is moving, almost at my elbow. That’s the one that’s more visible in my case. Feels kind of interesting.” “Ooh, don’t say that or I’ll shoot.” “Hah hah! I like a man who knows what he likes. Do you want to hear what I thought about when I came in the shower yesterday?” “Yes.”

• From Vox (1992)

  67 she was expressionless. Anyway, I took the book home and read it, and you know what? It was good! Not only did it give me a partial erection on two occasions, I actually got tears in my eyes toward the end! It's about a man and a woman in a cabin in the woods. He's a klutzy scientist, she helps him get less klutzy and finally gets him to shave off his beard and it turns out that when he's cleaned up he's irresistible and despite being unschooled in the ways of love he is successful in bringing her to a fever pitch. Good stuff. I mean I probably won't reread it very soon, but when you think of some of the stuff that passes for highbrow these days, you've got to admire it for hanging back so humbly in the genre category. But never mind that. I finished the book, and I pictured the woman who owned the book finishing the book, with her normal flannel nightgown on—she switches out the light, she closes her eyes, she switches on the alarm—and then I turned the last page of the book, and there were more pages, there were four or five pages of promotion, up coming titles, etcetera, and I turned to this one page. You ready? I'm going to read it to you. It says, 'You'll flip . . . your pages won't! Read paperbacks hands-free with BOOK MATE I. The perfect "mate" for all your ro mance paperbacks. Traveling, vacationing, at work, in bed, studying, cooking, eating.' Did you hear that 'in bed' in the middle there? It's squirreled away in a non sexual list, legitimized, like those gigantic massager wands that are always accompanied by catalog copy that

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  [image file=image_rsrc1C7.jpg] Maria and I never stopped exchanging letters. She was back at the University of Chicago completing a graduate degree. Or she was in Iowa for the summer working for a socialist candidate for the state legislature. “It has nothing to do with being pro-Russian!” she bitterly replied to my note of muted caution (the McCarthy era had just ended). “The Midwest has its own tradition of populism, which you’d know if you ever read some political history instead of all that crepuscular fiction. Or at least some honest Midwestern novelist like Sherwood Anderson or Dreiser rather than your putrescent Barbey d’Aurevilly!” And I could just hear her laughing with her beautiful musical laugh at her own fulminations. At Christmas I saw her in Chicago. My mother invited her to dinner. The only other guest was my mother’s new secretary, a suburban simpleton in penny loafers, knee socks, a tartan skirt closed by a giant safety pin. Maria (chic black dress and stiletto heels, brilliants in her upswept hair) helped Beth wash my mother’s dishes, as guests often did out of neighborliness in those days in the Plains states. I overheard Beth say to Maria, “Don’t you just love that song ‘When you walk through a storm, keep your chin up high’? Isn’t it inspiring? Doesn’t it make you want to cry?” “I think it’s sickening rubbish,” Maria said evenly. And yet Maria doted on my mother, admired her for her courage and resourcefulness as a woman on her own. Indeed, through Maria’s eyes I began to see my mother as a character of some interest, although what most redeemed her was simply the distance that allowed her to be seen at all. As a boy, I’d loved and loathed my mother with the same relentless energy I’d devoted to myself. Or perhaps I should say I studied my mother instead of myself as though she’d been a mirror to my failings. Now I was a student and, as Maria claimed, an “intellectual.” This identity by way of an honorific allowed me to look at my mother as someone brave “for her time”: condescension permitted admiration. After the Christmas Day dinner, which began at three in the afternoon but continued until seven-thirty, Maria and I escaped. Once again we were driving through loose wet snow that melted on contact. After living in a college town with its noisy dorms and hushed libraries, its meteor crater of a stadium, its dark streets lined with illuminated fraternity houses, its sketchy downtown of textbook stores and hamburger joints, coming back to a real city made my pulse race. Here were all these adult men and women with money to burn—burn in the form of crêpes flambées, of smoldering cigars, of burning whisky, of steamy sex, fires flaring up against the cold night.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The next morning I had breakfast with Maria at the inn. Solitaire was made up of the paying guests, mostly older Sunday painters who came for a week or two and stayed with their husbands in the inn, and the kids who lived in the cabins for the whole summer and did odd jobs. Maria had befriended two of the older women; we stopped at their table on the way in. I was introduced to the artistic wives and their husbands, obese, amiable. Lots of loud polite talk—the skinny boy at the next table smirked with a thin Voltairian sneer. Maria was teaching a life-drawing class and she promised Marge, one of the two ladies, some extra time this afternoon. The rest of the morning we spent on the porch in front of Maria’s cabin. She was wearing a floppy straw hat and a halter top. She was painting a still life—wine bottle, apple, Cinzano ashtray—and she laughed and said, “This is hard. Abstract Expressionism eliminated all this tiresome observation.” Although she was a Communist, Maria liked the songs of Noel Coward, Mabel Mercer, and Marlene Dietrich, and she played their records for me in the underfurnished rec room at the inn. She was the first to see the irony in this inconsistency, but her merely personal taste scarcely counted, she thought, when the question was one of a “scientific theory of history.” I quickly came to love the tumbling wit of the Coward lyrics and the quixotic charms of Mercer and Dietrich, two stylists without voices and with a range of about five notes. Coward’s rolled r’s and theatrical diction, joined to the gossip that he was “gay,” interested me. “Yes,” Maria said casually, “all slander, no doubt.” Closer to hand were Betts and Buddy, an ancient lesbian couple who lived in the most remote cabin at Solitaire. Just once I saw Buddy, who had been elected the local sheriff. I mistook her for a man, a short wide man, with grizzled, close-cropped hair and a swaggering walk. She was wearing her uniform and talking to the colony director, a much younger woman. I never saw Betts, but Maria often did, and loved describing her. “They’re terribly poor, but Betts must have been a debutante fifty years ago because she has such fussy, elegant manners. She never leaves the cabin and is always wearing silk lounging pajamas and angora high-heeled slippers. She draws and redraws her makeup. She smokes with a cigarette holder and languishes. We’re led to believe she’s ill, but of what no one is crude enough to ask. Buddy stops at the bar in town for a drink every evening to shoot the shit with the guys, but then hurries home to her better half. Isn’t it bizarre we find their marriage charming but we can’t endure the heterosexual original they’re aping?”

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  During the first six months I had to rotate from one department to the next, working first as a researcher in the library, then as an expediter in the mailroom or the production department. At last I was permitted to write a single caption, edited by three different hands before the picture was dropped in the final layout at press time. By the end of the year I had been given my own cubicle and phone and a door that closed. I was still researching and writing the odd caption. Once a month I’d be invited to a luncheon for twenty people held in a small dining room on the top floor of the building, overlooking all of Manhattan. The older editors would do most of the talking. At my university I’d met professors who, of course, were experts in their field but had no sociable way of talking about this knowledge and knew nothing about anything else. These editors—sharp-featured, capillaries broken from discreet alcoholism—seemed to know everything and to have done everything. They had flown as fighter pilots, one had served as interpreter for MacArthur in Japan, another had traveled with Margaret Bourke-White to the South Pole, or helped expose a city hall scandal, taken a sympathetic look at the Hollywood Ten, researched the profile of Marilyn Monroe at the Actors Studio … They mentioned books about the Ballets Russes, the Wright Brothers, Jefferson’s slave mistress, Churchill at Malta, and everyone had a wisecrack about the author, an anecdote to relate about once tying one on with him or her in Singapore or Lisbon. One editor knew the best expert to consult on Persian rugs, another spoke of his hopes for the Bermuda Cup, a third named the best greens in Scotland. The current congressional expense-account scandal drew a quick laugh. Mary Leakey’s dates for the first hominids were greeted skeptically. The range of their knowledge was stunning and peculiarly personal, since everything they’d learned they’d picked up on a story. A quick prep and then two thousand words on the endangered statues at Abu Simbel, or two columns on Robert Moses’s plan to pave over lower Manhattan. A quick visit to Sidney Janis and some lively copy on this new Pop Art, its star Andy Warhol, the guy who’d said on TV Pop Art isn’t satire, it’s just a way of liking things. I could never speak as fast as these editors. The little knowledge I had I wore heavily. It had never occurred to me until now that almost all the news got made and reported by a small elite who’d met each other at a few Ivy League schools. Although I barely made enough money to squeak by from one check to the next, lived on spaghetti, and purchased my new suit on a revolving credit plan, I scarcely thought about money.