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 Wild (2012)

  Not that I was a photographer. I’d gone to an outdoor store in Minneapolis called REI about a dozen times over the previous months to purchase a good portion of these items. Seldom was this a straightforward affair. To buy even a water bottle without first thoroughly considering the latest water bottle technology was folly, I quickly learned. There were the pros and cons of various materials to take into account, not to mention the research that had been done regarding design. And this was only the smallest, least complex of the purchases I had to make. The rest of the gear I would need was ever more complex, I realized after consulting with the men and women of REI, who inquired hopefully if they could help me whenever they spotted me before displays of ultralight stoves or strolling among the tents. These employees ranged in age and manner and area of wilderness adventure proclivity, but what they had in common was that every last one of them could talk about gear, with interest and nuance, for a length of time that was so dumbfounding that I was ultimately bedazzled by it. They cared if my sleeping bag had snag-free zipper guards and a face muff that allowed the hood to be cinched snug without obstructing my breathing. They took pleasure in the fact that my water purifier had a pleated glass-fiber element for increased surface area. And their knowledge had a way of rubbing off on me. By the time I made the decision about which backpack to purchase—a top-of-the-line Gregory hybrid external frame that claimed to have the balance and agility of an internal—I felt as if I’d become a backpacking expert. It was only as I stood gazing at that pile of meticulously chosen gear on the bed in my Mojave motel room that I knew with profound humility that I was not. I worked my way through the mountain of things, wedging and cramming and forcing them into every available space of my pack until nothing more could possibly fit. I had planned to use the bungee cords to attach my food bag, tent, tarp, clothing sack, and camp chair that doubled as a sleeping pad to the outside of my pack—in the places on the external frame meant for that purpose—but now it was apparent that there were other things that would have to go on the outside too. I pulled the bungee cords around all the things I’d planned to and then looped a few extra things through them as well: the straps of my sandals and the camera case and the handles of the insulated mug and the candle lantern. I clipped the metal trowel in its U-Dig-It sheath to my backpack’s belt and attached the keychain that was a thermometer to one of my pack’s zippers.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  l62 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL fully with simple people, and was impatient when his friends did not want him annoyed by children. He was valorous, fearless, an outdoor man, and an invincible fighter. Buthe was so tender to the sick and so com- radely with the poor that " Christlike " has remained one ofthe aristocratic adjectives in our language, and men like Saint Francis, who followed him and grew like him, have stood out as the beloved souls, the rare flowers ofesoteric humanity. He was a proud spirit who lived out his own life and asserted himself against all the weight of authority, against his king, against the supreme court of his nation, against Moses, against professional theology and the law- yer caste, against the power of custom, against his home community, against his own mother. But he had a thirst for friendship, an unfailing insight into the subtler motives and longings of men and women, a thrilling re- sponsiveness to the emotions of masses of men, and an unexampled sense ofthesacredness of personality. He bowed tolaw andorder. He paid his taxes, and advised others to do it. He senta leper to the proper officer to get his sanitary certificate. But he had no spiritual awe for the exponents of the present social or- der. He challenged itsmoral basis. He dropped into the silenceofa passive resister when he faced a typical court, and hewas felt then and ever since as a force against despotism. The personality of Jesus isa call tothe emancipa- tion of our own personalities. He has multiplied free souls. Every such soul counts in the progress of man- kind. They arerare. They are most effective inthe

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  is dashing with the Kingdom of Evil. You can tell where the conflict is on today when you hear the voice of prophetic religion. In every religious body, even in those that have repudiated priestliness, you have the un- developed and unconscious priest and prophet side by side; mixed types, like Ezekiel and Savonarola; embry- onic prophets ; spent prophets ; prophets who have given up; prophets whose bodies and minds have been hurt and thrown out of equilibrium. God knows his own. The prophet is always the predestined advance agent of the Kingdom of God. His religion flings him as a fighter and protester against the Kingdom of Evil. His sense of justice, compassion, and solidarity sends him into tasks which would be too perilous for others. It connects him with oppressed social classes as their leader. He bears their risk and contempt. As he tries to rally the moral and religious forces of society, he encounters derelict and frozen religion, and the selfish and conserva- tive interest of the classes which exploit religion. He tries to arouse institutional religion from the inside, or he pounds it from the outside. This puts him in the posi- tion of a heretic, a free thinker, an enemy of religion, an atheist. Probably no prophet escaped without bearing some such name. His opposition to social injustice arouses the same kind of antagonism from those who profit by it. How far these interests w<ll go in their methods of suppressing the prophets depends on their power and their needs. I have been impressed with the fact that though Christianity began in a renascence of prophetism, scarcely any personality who bears the marks of the prophet can be found in Church History between 278 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL A. D. 100 and A. D. 1200. Two main explanations sug- gest themselves : that their own capacity for self-sacrifice led the potential prophets into the monasteries and put them under monastic obedience; and that the Catholic Church, which embodies the priestly principles, suffocated the nascent prophets by its spiritual authority and the physical force it could command. In this way the death of Jesus has taken personal hold on countless religious souls. It has set them free from the fear of pain and the fear of men, and given them a certain finishing quality of strength. It has inspired courage and defiance of evil, and sent men on lost hopes. The cross of Christ put God's approval on the sacrificial impulse in the hearts of the brave, and dignified it by con- necting it with one of the central dogmas of our faith. The cross has become the motive and the method of noble personalities. It has compelled reflection on the value of the prophets for the progress of humanity. What might have been a sporadic and unaccountable religious instinct, has been lifted to the level of a law of history and religion.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Every diagnostic tap further injured the nerve, it seemed to me. I went up the chain of specialists until I reached the in-house repetitive-motion expert, Dr. Susan Orowitz-Rudman, a short cheerful woman of forty. I told her that I was a career temp and that I really had to be able to continue using the keyboard. She was full of ideas and theories. I found her hyphenated name powerfully attractive. “Is there any other related repetitive motion that you engage in?” she asked. “One patient of mine was a legal secretary and a fanatical bicyclist on weekends, and it turned out that it wasn’t the typing but the combination of typing and pulling on the hand-brakes of her bicycle that was causing the carpal flare. She switched to swimming and took a week off from work and she was able to keep her job and not have the operation. I’m happy to do the operation,” she added. “It’s not a big deal, it’s just a matter of making a little incision right here—but I’m just saying that sometimes there are ways to make the problem go away by itself.” I told her that I snapped my fingers to music sometimes, and that I did some writing of my own in the evenings and on weekends which added to the overall amount of typing I did. “What sort of writing do you do?” she asked politely, noting this down. “Just stories. Nothing published. But I get caught up in it and I keep typing and typing and typing. The whole wrist problem has gotten much worse since I’ve started doing it.” Dr. Orowitz-Rudman talked about alternative keyboards and about dictating my own writing and then having a friend transcribe it. She suggested two weeks off from work. She also spoke highly of manual typewriters: since they took more muscle strength, they seemed to bother the nerve less. Some anthropology professor at Harvard had gone back to his old Olivetti portable and been cured completely. She described some research she was doing: “I’m interested in developing a wrist sensor,” she said, “that will work as a biofeedback device, signaling the user when a motion is in progress that is likely to further inflame the nerve, based on certain correlations. But what I’m doing now is not that advanced, although it’s quite interesting—I mean, of course it is interesting to me, but it can also be interesting to my patients, and helpful. I’m trying to develop a set of MRI motion studies for various characteristic motions, such as typing a particular letter of the alphabet, opening an oyster, salad prep, and so forth. We use something called a fast-pulse-sequence echo-planar MRI machine, which essentially shows the nerve responding to the motions as they proceed. Would you be interested in taking part?” “Remind me what MRI is?” “Magnetic Resonance Imaging.” “Oh!” I said. “Big time!” Extremely flattered, I said I probably would like to take part.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  and women, not their hierarchy. In a Greco-Roman society that treated women as inferiors, this was disruptive, to say the least. I’m married to a strong woman who is fully my equal. There is nothing weak about her or any of the countless women I know. Let’s get past the outdated idea of a “weaker sex,” which is based in part on a misreading of this text. The point isn’t that women are inherently weaker. It’s that a husband must use his power and privilege to serve, not to take; to liberate, not to dominate. I think it was a reference not to innate gender differences, but to gender stereotypes and cultural norms that made it nearly impossible for women to live independently. That wasn’t their fault; it was society’s fault. The culture was skewed against women. Culture had given men power and authority, and Peter was telling them to stop abusing that privilege and instead to see their wives (and by extension women in general) as equals. Because God himself was watching. Since Peter’s time, a lot has changed, and yet at the same time very little has changed. Although women have more opportunities than they did two thousand years ago, they still face countless challenges that men do not. We aren’t where we need to be as a society, and that includes the church. Men—in the home, in the church, and in society—are solemnly charged by God to treat the women in their lives as equals in every way. The same goes for every other marginalized community around us. As Christians, we have an obligation to live as Jesus did. He sought out and served poor people, lepers, sinners, thieves, widows, women, Samaritans, tax collectors, and societal outcasts. He served the rich, the religious, and the rulers too, but He didn’t show them preference. If anything, He held them to a higher standard because of their power. Jesus didn’t reject anyone. Instead, He called everyone equally to love God above all and to love their neighbor as themselves. What does this mean for us today? That God doesn’t hear our prayers on Sunday if we are harming the people He loves Monday through Saturday. He won’t listen to us if we are using our position or power to take rather than to give. If

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  I have had many such glimpses of Justine at different times, and of course I knew her well by sight long before we met: our city does not permit anonymity to any with incomes of over two hundred pounds a year. I see her sitting alone by the sea, reading a newspaper and eating an apple; or in the vestibule of the Cecil Hotel, among the dusty palms, dressed in a sheath of silver drops, holding her magnificent fur at her back as a peasant holds his coat — her long forefinger hooked through the tag. Nessim has stopped at the door of the ballroom which is flooded with light and music. He has missed her. Under the palms, in a deep alcove, sit a couple of old men playing chess. Justine has stopped to watch them. She knows nothing of the game, but the aura of stillness and concentration which brims the alcove fascinates her. She stands there between the deaf players and the world of music for a long time, as if uncertain into which to plunge. Finally Nessim comes softly to take her arm and they stand together for a while, she watching the players, he watching her. At last she goes softly, reluctantly, circumspectly into the lighted world with a little sigh. Then in other circumstances, less creditable no doubt to herself, or to the rest of us: how touching, how pliantly feminine this most masculine and resourceful of women could be. She could not help but remind me of that race of terrific queens which left behind them the ammoniac smell of their incestuous loves to hover like a cloud over the Alexandrian subconscious. The giant man-eating cats like Arsinoe were her true siblings. Yet behind the acts of Justine lay something else, born of a later tragic philosophy in which morals must be weighed in the balance against rogue personality. She was the victim of truly heroic doubts. Nevertheless I can still see a direct connection between the picture of Justine bending over the dirty sink with the foetus in it, and poor Sophia of Valentinus who died for a love as perfect as it was wrong-headed. * * * * * At that epoch, Georges-Gaston Pombal, a minor consular official, shares a small flat with me in the Rue Nebi Daniel. He is a rare figure among the diplomats in that he appears to possess a vertebral column. For him the tiresome treadmill of protocol and entertainment — so like a surrealist nightmare — is full of exotic charm. He sees diplomacy through the eyes of a Douanier Rousseau. He indulges himself with it but never allows it to engulf what remains of his intellect. I suppose the secret of his success is his tremendous idleness, which almost approaches the supernatural.

• From The Art of Memoir

  and when and the directness of his utterance that we connect with. A polymath like Nabokov (more on him in the next chapter) wows us with his linguistic surface; McCourt works to make us identify with him more. The first paragraph posits family trouble—My father and mother should have stayed in New York—then draws the simplest list of siblings, ending with the awful presence of a dead infant. And since McCourt knows in some ways that we as readers fear the cliché of an awful Irish childhood, he addresses that fear right off. So he comes straight to where the reader’s cynicism about his enterprise hides. McCourt then routs it out with mockery: the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests, bullying schoolmasters. . . . He ends with a simple, understated, carnal joke on himself in the physical cold of his island home: “Above all—we were wet.” McCourt raised psychological stakes while wowing us with both tragedy and humor—promises for what the book will hold. He would’ve failed trying to use Nabokov’s diction, syntax, or psychological approach. 5 | Don’t Try This at Home: The Seductive, Narcissistic Count . . . I mean what would you do if you had to create Beauty? I’m afraid I’d start screaming, the most irksome forms of insects coming from my mouth. I’m afraid I’d come up with Death. Dean Young, “One Story” So enchanting is the atmosphere Nabokov conjures in my brain that reading him almost rewires it. I lift my face from a folded-down page to find colors brighter, edges sharper. Trash I glimpse on my otherwise shoddy street—a ticket stub or lipsticky cigarette butt— come across as souvenirs from some intrigue that dissolved right before I looked up. The world becomes a magic collage or mysterious art box à la found-object assembler Joseph Cornell. And it works every time you reread—a miraculous widget for perceptual transformation. As Philip Larkin once said of poetry’s slot machine, you put the penny of your attention into it, pull a handle, and a feeling comes out. Like my students, I’ve tried to copy Nabokov’s mysterious dance methods, and I looked like a fool—some stout and hirsute cross-dresser trying to pass as pretty in pink ballerina tights. Having taught this book at least a dozen times, I still find it a mystery. Trying to catalogue Nabokov’s talents would take a library, and yet not to call out Speak, Memory in a book about memoir would be like Fourth of July sans fireworks. Looked at through the lens of a more ordinary writer’s gifts, Speak, Memory leaves out much that a normal reader tends to

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  And yet he survived. He has come through to this day with his thought and his personality still vital, sui generis, and far ahead of our day. Whenever his spirit has been embodied again in a striking degree in some individual, people have gathered around that man, hun- gry for salvation. Any man in whom the Jesus-strain reappears clearly is felt to be a kind of superman. If Tolstoi, for instance, had never begun to follow Christ INITIATOR OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD 1 65 in his life, he would be simply one of a group of brilliant Russian novelists. Since he received something of the mind of Jesus into his mind, he became one of the pro- phetic figures of our age and no one can tell how much he contributed, through others, to enable Russia, newly free, to make the one sincere and penetrating utterance made on behalf of democracy and peace in the Spring and Summer of 1917. In the same way those religious movements in which the distinctive ideas and spirit of Jesus have broken forth again, have been the fruitful and prophetic movements in religion. Their power of attack can best be measured by the ferocity with which the Kingdom of Evil has trampled on them. The Kingdom of God is not a concept nor an ideal merely, but an historical force. It is a vital and organ- izing energy now at work in humanity. Its capacity to save the social order depends on its pervasive presence within the social organism. Every institutional foot- hold gained gives a purchase for attacking the next van- tage-point. Where a really Christian type of religious life is created, the intellect and its education are set free, and this in turn aids religion to emancipate itself from su- perstition and dogmatism. Where religion and intellect combine, the foundation is laid for political democracy. Where the people have the outfit and the spirit of democracy, they can curb economic exploitation. Where predatory gain and the resultant inequality are lessened, fraternal feeling and understanding become easier and the sense of solidarity grows. Where men live in the consciousness of solidarity and in the actual practice of 1 66 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL love with their fellow-men, they are not far from the Kingdom of God. The great thing in the salvation of humanity is that salvation is present. Life begets life.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Her face was still thickly powdered, and very red at the lip; her lashes and eyelids were black with paint. She was dressed in the trousers and the shoes that she had worn for her act, but she had removed the jacket, the waistcoat, and, of course, the hat. Her starched shirt was held tight against the swell of her bosom by a pair of braces, but gaped at the throat where she had unclipped her bow-tie. Beyond the shirt I saw an edge of creamy lace.I looked away. ‘I do like your act,’ I said.‘I should think you do, you come to it so often!’I smiled. ‘Well, Tony lets me in, you see, for nothing ...’ That made her laugh: her tongue looked very pink, her teeth extraordinarily white, against her painted lips. I felt myself blush. ‘What I mean is,’ I said, ‘Tony lets me have the box. But I would pay if I had to, and sit in the gallery. For I do so like your act, Miss Butler, so very, very much.’Now she did not laugh, but she tilted her head a little. ‘Do you?’ she answered gently.‘Oh, yes.’‘Tell me what it is you like then, so much.’I hesitated. ‘I like your costume,’ I said at last. ‘I like your songs, and the way you sing them. I like the way you talk to Tricky. I like your ... hair.’ Here I stumbled; and now she seemed to blush. There was a second’s almost awkward silence - then, suddenly, as if from somewhere very near at hand, there came the sound of music - the blast of a horn and the pulse of a drum - and a cheer, like the roaring of the wind in some vast sea-shell. I gave a jump, and looked about me; and she laughed. ‘The second half,’ she said. After a moment the cheering stopped; the music, however, went on pulsing and thumping like a great heart-beat.She left off leaning against the table, and asked, Did I mind if she smoked? I shook my head, and shook it again when she took up a packet of cigarettes from amongst the dirty cups and playing cards, and held it to me. Upon the wall there was a hissing gas-jet in a wire cage, and she put her face to it, to light the cigarette. With the fag at the side of her lip, her eyes screwed up against the flame, she looked like a boy again; when she took the cigarette away, however, the cork was smudged with crimson. Seeing that, she tutted: ‘Look at me, with all my paint still on! Will you sit with me while I clean my face? It’s not very polite, I know, but I must get ready rather quick; my room is needed later by another girl ...’I did as she asked, and sat and watched her smear her cheeks with cream, then take a cloth to them.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  Jesus communed with God; he realized the evil in the world; and he held his life with a light grasp. Yet he escaped the noble temptations of religion contained in mysticism, pessimism, asceticism, and other-worldliness. Out of the same ingredients, communion with God, realization of evil, and religious intensity and self-con- trol, he built a higher synthesis. His attitude to life was the direct product of his ^twofold belief, in the Father INITIATOR OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD 159 who is love and the Kingdom of God which is righteous- ness. Mediaeval Christianity, which was mystic, as- cetic, and other-worldly, was not built on his synthesis. On the other hand the social gospel can be. His affir- mation of life is the ideal basis for the social gospel. No religion involving the negation of life is really com- patible with it. It remains to be seen whether any- thing like the social gospel can make headway in Buddhistic countries ; and if it does, whether it will not transform the old Buddhism. His communion with God and his devotion to the Kingdom of God set Jesus free and also bound him. They freed him from the conservatism of inherited re- ligion and from the coercion of the social order ; they bound him to a life of obedience and to the utter ser- vice of men. The harmony of these antinomies is one of the distinctive qualities of his personality. He was a loyal son of his nation, a believer in its traditions and its worth, and we know how deeply he was moved by his foresight of its disaster. His religious life was inseparable from that of his nation. There were no novel or alien elements in it, as with Paul or Philo, which might have laid the basis for departures. He never cut loose from the religion of his fathers, and never told his followers to leave the synagogue and found the Church. He was no come-outer. But he had a higher law and allegiance within him. In so far as the religious customs of Judaism conflicted with his consciousness of God or with the reign of love, he broke with them. He contravened the Sabbath regu- l6o A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  26O ATHEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL We have understood only one side of the atonement when we comprehend how the sins of humanity converged inthe death of Jesus and wereborne by him. The next question is, in what sense this can be said to affect God and to change the relation of humanity to him. Thefirst step toward a true view of the atonement is toseethe death of Christ as an integral part of his life. Theology has made afundamental mistake in treating theatonement as something distinct, and making the lifeof Jesus amere staging for his death, a matter almost negligible in the work of salvation. It isnot given toall to die a significant death. Usually, as we age or sicken, the work of our life and the things we have loved and lived for, begin to drop from our hands. Instead of dying fighting, we die what our pagan forefathers called a " straw-death/* Sometimes a brave life ends in a dishonorable death. Thedeath of Jesus was wholly of one piece with his life. He gath- ered all the radiance of his character and purpose inafo- cus-point of blazing light, and there he died. In living his life and dying his death as he did, Jesus lived out, confirmed, and achieved his own personality. Hedid it for himself, aswell as for God and humanity. There was no " merit " inthe medieval sense in it; noth- ing superfluous whichhecould hand over and credit to others to make up theirdefects. Just as we owe God the complete best that is in us, so Jesus too owed life and deathto God. He wasunder thelaw hehad proclaimed, that " from him to whom much is given, much shallbe required." Hisdeath was not simply aninfliction from without.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Title : The Chronology of Water Author: Yuknavitch, Lidia [image file=image_rsrc266.jpg] Table of Contents Praise Dedication Acknowledgements Title Page Introduction Epigraph I. Holding Breath The Chronology of Water Metaphor On Sound and Speech The Best Friend Suitcase Deliverance Love Grenade I The Other Lubbock Zombie What It’s Not Crooked Lovesong Family Drama This is Not About my Sister Ash II. Under Blue Baptismal Swimming with Amateurs Father How To Ride a Bike The Less Than Merry Pranksters III. The Wet A Happy Childhood Illness as Metaphor A Burning The Hairy Girls Nemesis Love Grenade II A Body in a Kayak Writing About Hair and Skin Harder My Mother Demonology IV. Resuscitations A Drowning Scene Distilled My Lover, Writing Short Story Gray Matter Secular Miracle Dreaming in Women V. The Other Side of Drowning Run On Collision as Metaphor How to Love Your Mother After She’s Dead Your Tax Dollars At Work Conversion Ecstatic State The Scarlett Letter Sun In the Company of Men A Sanctuary Angina How to Hold Your Breath Water The Other Side of Drowning À La Recherché du Temps Perdu A Small Ocean Wisdom is a Motherfucker Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch Copyright Page FLOODED WITH LIGHT and incandescent beauty, The Chronology of Water cuts through the heart of the reader. These fierce life stories gleam, fiery images passing just beneath the surface of the pages. You will feel rage, fear, release, and joy, and you will not be able to stop reading this deeply brave and human voice. DIANA ABU-JABER, author of Origin: A Novel I LOVE THIS book and I am thankful that Lidia Yuknavitch has written it for me and for everyone else who has ever had to sometimes kind of work at staying alive. It’s about the body, brain, and soul of a woman who has managed to scratch up through the slime and concrete and crap of life in order to resurrect herself. The kind of book Janis Joplin might have written if she had made it through the fire - raw, tough, pure, more full of love than you thought possible and sometimes even hilarious. This is the book Lidia Yuknavitch was put on the planet to write for us. REBECCA BROWN, author of The Gifts of the Body FROM THE MOMENT I picked up The Chronology of Water, I couldn’t put it down, and I thought about it long after I’d finished. Reading this book is like diving into Yuknavitch’s most secret places, where, really, we all want memoir to take us, but it so rarely does. The reader emerges wiser, enlightened, and changed. KERRY COHEN, author of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity THIS INTENSELY POWERFUL memoir touches depths yet unheard of in contemporary writing. I read it at one sitting and wondered for days after about love, time, and truth. Can’t get me any more excited than this. ANDREI CODRESCU, author of The Poetry Lesson

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  At the pool near my home there is a woman who is missing a leg. She swims her laps with a prosthetic that has a flipper at the end. Very high-tech. Her workouts, I’ve noticed, are formidable. I love her made-up leg. I like to swim near her. Sometimes kids and teens take up a lane -no doubt they are on swim teams - I can tell by their spectacular strokes and the kinds of swimsuits and caps and goggles they wear. They are in the sweet. Effortlessly. Old men people the lap lanes too, most always extra friendly to me. Their skin hangs off of their backs in pale speckled folds. Their legs seem too thin to carry them - and they nearly all wear some form of white or beige boxer trunks. Sometimes with very thin fabric. But they wrestle the water anyhow, in all shapes and sizes, all forms of swimming. Once I stopped my laps to rest and two of them were staring at me. One said to the other, “Ain’t she something?” The other one said, “And how.” Then they clapped. It cracked me up. I still see them sometimes. We say hello, or goodbye, or keep up the good work. Middle-aged women like me show up too - most of them do not have the stroke quality of someone who has competed - but I am filled with wonder at them anyway. They put their bodies in the water to swim the same way that I do. Maybe they are trying to shed pounds. Or maybe stress. Or lives. Or maybe it just feels good - being alone in water - no kids hanging on you, no husband to tend to, no one and nothing to answer to. When the pool is full I’ve noticed I’m among the first they will ask if they can share a lane. They must be able to tell I’m going to lap them and lap them. But there must be something more important that draws them to my lane. I think - I hope it is that the water is safe. Gay men are there too, I can tell. Their legs will be hairless or they’ll be wearing earrings and, well, the only other men besides athletes who wear Speedos are gay. I sometimes have to fight off strange impulses to crawl over the lane line into their lanes and hug them - to thank them for being the men they are - men who showed me love and compassion at every important moment of my life - even though we are strangers. Occasionally a swim coach will show up. I always get the same question. “Did you compete?” I nod and dip back under quickly. It’s not a conversation I want to have any longer, and they often ask me about joining Masters Swimming. I don’t want to join Masters Swimming. I want just to be in water. In the voiceless blue. In the weightless wet.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  274 A THEOLOGY FOR THESOCIAL GOSPEL stitution of humanity. Then it can not be impossible tofound society on love. The atonement isthe symbol and basisofanew social order. Third: the death of Christ has reinforced prophetic religion. 1 Historical criticism has performed an inestimable serv- ice totrue religion by clearing up the historical antagon- ism between priest and prophet in the Old Testament, and labeling the literary documents of Jewish religion according tothe religious interest which produced orre- edited them. This antagonism is a permanent element intheChristian religion, and part of the conflict between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of EviL A com- prehension of thedifference between prophet and priest is essentialto a clear understanding of Jesus and to in- telligent discipleship. The priest is the religiousprofessional, He performs religious functions which others are not allowedto per- form. It is therefore to hisinterest to deny the right of free access to God, and to interpose himself and his ceremonial between the common manand God.He hasan interest in representing God as remote, liable to anger, jealous ofhis rights, and quick to punish, be- cause this gives importance tothe ritual methods of pla- cating God whichthe priest alone can handle. Itis essential to the priestly interest to establish a monopoly of rights andfunctions forhis group. Heisall forau- thority, and insome form or other he is always a importance of prophecy within the Christian religion has been discussed in part in Chapter XVI, THE SOCIAL GOSPEL AND THEATONEMENT spokesman ofthat authority andshares itsinfluence. Doctrine and history ashe teaches it, establisha jure divino institutionofhis order, which is transmitted either by physical descent, as in the Aaronic priesthood, or by spiritual descent through some form ofexclusive ordina- tion, asin the Catholic priesthood. As history invari- ably contradicts his claims, he frequently tampers with history by Deuteronomiccodes or Pseudo-Isidorian De- cretals, in order to secure precedents and the weight of antiquity. He is opposed tofree historical investiga- tion becausethis tears open the protective webofideal- ized history and doctrine which he has wovenabout him. Heis the middle manof religion, and likeother middle- men heis sincerely convinced that heis necessary for the good of humanity and that religion would perish with- out him. Butunderneath allis the selfish interest ofhis class, which exploits religion. The prophet becomesa prophet by some personal ex- perience of God, which henceforth isthe dominant reality ofhis life.It creates inward convictions which become his message tomen. Usually after great inwardcon- flicts and the bursting of priest-made barriershe hasdis- covered the way of access to God, and hasfound him wonderful, just, merciful, free.Asa result ofhis own experience he usually becomes the constitutional en- emy of priestlyreligion, thescornerof sacrificialand ritual doings, a voiceofdoubtaboutthe doctrines and theliterature which shelterthe priest. Hetoo is a middle-man, but he wantsno monopoly. His highest desire istohave all men share whathe has experienced. If his own casteor people claim special privileges asa

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

  And this indicates its value. It is not apostolical, not inspired—far from it—but the oldest and best among the sub-apostolic writings both in form and contents. It was occasioned by party differences and quarrels in the church of Corinth, where the sectarian spirit, so earnestly rebuked by Paul in his first Epistle, had broken out afresh and succeeded in deposing the regular officers (the presbyter-bishops). The writer exhorts the readers to harmony and love, humility, and holiness, after the pattern of Christ and his apostles, especially Peter and Paul, who had but recently sealed their testimony with their blood. He speaks in the highest terms of Paul who, "after instructing the whole [Roman] world in righteousness, and after having reached the end of the West, and borne witness before the rulers, departed into the holy place, leaving the greatest example of patient endurance."1203 He evinces the calm dignity and executive wisdom of the Roman church in her original simplicity, without hierarchical arrogance; and it is remarkable how soon that church recovered after the terrible ordeal of the Neronian persecution, which must have been almost an annihilation. He appeals to the word of God as the final authority, but quotes as freely from the Apocrypha as from the canonical Scriptures (the Septuagint). He abounds in free reminiscences of the teaching of Christ and the Apostles.1204 He refers to Paul’s (First) Epistle to the Corinthians, and shows great familiarity with his letters, with James, First Peter, and especially the Epistle to the Hebrews, from which he borrows several expressions. Hence he is mentioned—with Paul, Barnabas, and Luke—as one of the supposed authors of that anonymous epistle. Origen conjectured that Clement or Luke composed the Hebrews under the inspiration or dictation of Paul. Clement bears clear testimony to the doctrines of the Trinity ("God, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, who are the faith and the hope of the elect"), of the Divine dignity and glory of Christ, salvation only by his blood, the necessity of repentance and living faith, justification by grace, sanctification by the Holy Spirit, the unity of the church, and the Christian graces of humility, charity, forbearance, patience, and perseverance. In striking contrast with the bloody cruelties practiced by Domitian, he exhorts to prayer for the civil rulers, that God "may give them health, peace, concord, and stability for the administration of the government be has given them."1205 We have here the echo of Paul’s exhortation to the Romans (Rom. 13) under the tyrant Nero. Altogether the Epistle of Clement is worthy of a disciple of the apostles, although falling far short of their writings in original simplicity, terseness, and force.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  In a Greco-Roman society that treated women as inferiors, this was disruptive, to say the least. I’m married to a strong woman who is fully my equal. There is nothing weak about her or any of the countless women I know. Let’s get past the outdated idea of a “weaker sex,” which is based in part on a misreading of this text. The point isn’t that women are inherently weaker. It’s that a husband must use his power and privilege to serve , not to take; to liberate , not to dominate. I think it was a reference not to innate gender differences, but to gender stereotypes and cultural norms that made it nearly impossible for women to live independently. That wasn’t their fault; it was society’s fault. The culture was skewed against women. Culture had given men power and authority, and Peter was telling them to stop abusing that privilege and instead to see their wives (and by extension women in general) as equals. Because God himself was watching. Since Peter’s time, a lot has changed, and yet at the same time very little has changed. Although women have more opportunities than they did two thousand years ago, they still face countless challenges that men do not. We aren’t where we need to be as a society, and that includes the church. Men—in the home, in the church, and in society—are solemnly charged by God to treat the women in their lives as equals in every way. The same goes for every other marginalized community around us. As Christians, we have an obligation to live as Jesus did. He sought out and served poor people, lepers, sinners, thieves, widows, women, Samaritans, tax collectors, and societal outcasts. He served the rich, the religious, and the rulers too, but He didn’t show them preference. If anything, He held them to a higher standard because of their power. Jesus didn’t reject anyone. Instead, He called everyone equally to love God above all and to love their neighbor as themselves. What does this mean for us today? That God doesn’t hear our prayers on Sunday if we are harming the people He loves Monday through Saturday. He won’t listen to us if we are using our position or power to take rather than to give. If that is the case, His ear is open to their cry, not ours. We could actually make ourselves His enemies if we are hurting those with less power or voice than us. That includes ethnic minorities, foreigners, marginalized communities, people with less economic or educational privilege, employees, those who struggle with addictions or mental illness, LGBTQ individuals, prisoners and ex-convicts, those whose body types don’t fit the “ideal,” those who find themselves homeless, immigrants, older adults, disabled people—and the list goes on indefinitely.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  To have written so much and to have said nothing about Balthazar is indeed an omission — for in a sense he is one of the keys to the City. The key: Yes, I took him very much as he was in those days and now in my memory I feel that he is in need of a new evaluation. There was much that I did not understand then, much that I have since learned. I remember chiefly those interminable evenings spent at the Café Al Aktar playing backgammon while he smoked his favourite Lakadif in a pipe with a long stem. If Mnemjian is the archives of the City, Balthazar is its Platonic daimon — the mediator between its Gods and its men. It sounds far-fetched, I know. I see a tall man in a black hat with a narrow brim. Pombal christened him ‘the botanical goat’. He is thin, stoops slightly, and has a deep croaking voice of great beauty, particularly when he quotes or recites. In speaking to you he never looks at you directly — a trait which I have noticed in many homosexuals. But in him this does not signify inversion, of which he is not only not ashamed, but to which he is actually indifferent; his yellow goat-eyes are those of a hypnotist. In not looking at you he is sparing you from a regard so pitiless that it would discountenance you for an evening. It is a mystery how he can have, suspended from his trunk, hands of such monstrous ugliness. I would long since have cut them off and thrown them into the sea. Under his chin he has one dark spur of hair growing, such as one sometimes sees upon the hoof of a sculptured Pan. Several times in the course of those long walks we took together, beside the sad velvet broth of the canal, I found myself wondering what was the quality in him which arrested me. This was before I knew anything about the Cabal. Though he reads widely Balthazar’s conversation is not heavily loaded with the kind of material that might make one think him bookish: like Pursewarden. He loves poetry, parable, science and sophistry — but there is a lightness of touch and a judgement behind his thinking. Yet underneath the lightness there is something else — a resonance which gives his thinking density. His vein is aphoristic, and it sometimes gives him the touch of a minor oracle. I see now that he was one of those rare people who had found a philosophy for himself and whose life was occupied in trying to live it. I think this is the unanalysed quality which gives his talk cutting-edge.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Then: once I had been persuaded to lecture upon the native poet of the city at the Atelier des Beaux Arts — a sort of club where gifted amateurs of the arts could meet, rent studios and so on. I had accepted because it meant a little money for Melissa’s new coat, and autumn was on the way. But it was painful to me, feeling the old man all round me, so to speak, impregnating the gloomy streets around the lecture-room with the odour of those verses distilled from the shabby but rewarding loves he had experienced — loves perhaps bought with money, and lasting a few moments, yet living on now in his verse — so deliberately and tenderly had he captured the adventive minute and made all its colours fast. What an impertinence to lecture upon an ironist who so naturally, and with such fineness of instinct took his subject-matter from the streets and brothels of Alexandria! And to be talking, moreover, not to an audience of haberdashers’ assistants and small clerks — his immortals — but to a dignified semi-circle of society ladies for whom the culture he represented was a sort of blood-bank: they had come along for a transfusion. Many had actually foregone a bridge-party to do so, though they knew that instead of being uplifted they would be stupefied. I remember saying only that I was haunted by his face — the horrifyingly sad gentle face of the last photograph; and when the solid burghers’ wives had dribbled down the stone staircase into the wet streets where their lighted cars awaited them, leaving the gaunt room echoing with their perfumes, I noticed that they had left behind them one solitary student of the passions and the arts. She sat in a thoughtful way at the back of the hall, her legs crossed in a mannish attitude, puffing a cigarette. She did not look at me but crudely at the ground under her feet. I was flattered to think that perhaps one person had appreciated my difficulties. I gathered up my damp brief case and ancient mackintosh and made my way down to where a thin penetrating drizzle swept the streets from the direction of the sea. I made for my lodgings where by now Melissa would be awake, and would have set out our evening meal on the newspaper-covered table, having first sent Hamid out to the baker’s to fetch the roast — we had no oven of our own.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER’S central metaphor works beautifully: we all keep our heads above water, look around, and enjoy our corporeal life despite all the reasons not to; beyond that, the book is immensely impressive to me on a human level: the narrator/speaker/protagonist/author emerges from a seriously hellish childhood and spooky adolescence into a middle age not of bliss, certainly, but of convincing engagement and satisfaction. DAVID SHIELDS, author of Reality Hunger : A Manifesto I’VE READ MS. YUKNAVITCH’S book The Chronology of Water, cover to cover, a dozen times. I am still reading it. And I will, most likely, return to it for inspiration and ideas, and out of sheer admiration, for the rest of my life. The book is extraordinary. CHUCK PALAHNIUK, author of Pygmy LIDIA YUKNAVITCH’S MEMOIR The Chronology of Water is a brutal beauty bomb and a true love song. Rich with story, alive with emotion, both merciful and utterly merciless, I am forever altered by every stunning page. This is the book I’m going to press into everyone’s hands for years to come. This is the book I’ve been waiting to read all of my life. CHERYL STRAYED, author of Wild This book is for-and written through - Andy and Miles Mingo. Acknowledgements IF YOU HAVE EVER FUCKED UP IN YOUR LIFE, OR IF THE great river of sadness that runs through us all has touched you, then this book is for you. So thank you for the collective energy it takes to write in the face of culture. I can feel you. Energy never dies. It just changes forms. My beloved friends and mentors Ken Kesey and Kathy Acker are in the space dust and DNA and words. Thank you Rhonda Hughes, editrix extrodinaire, as well as all the people at Hawthorne Books for believing in my writing. Bold Swimmers. Thanks to Lance and Andy Olsen, my artheart heroes. And to Ryan Smith and Virginia Paterson, through the miles. To Diana Abu Jaber, thank you for saying to me twenty years ago about a single story, “I think this might be a book.” It just took me a really long time to get it. Thank you to the less than Merry Pranksters, particularly Bennett Huffman: rest peacefully, Bennett, you were the best among us, chaotic, beautiful stardust. A great waterfall of thanks to Michael Connors for, well, everything, and to Dean Hart, for making the everything possible. Thank you for mercifully loving all the me’s I have brought to your doorstep. Thank you to the greatest writing group in the history of ever: Chelsea Cain, Monica Drake, Cheryl Strayed, Mary Wysong, Diana Jordan, Erin Leonard, Suzy Vitello, and Chuck Palahniuk. And Jim Frost. Special thanks to Chelsea for writing the introduction, and to Chuck for inviting me in, and to Chuck and Chelsea for reading early versions of this manuscript and helping me to not lose my marbles. Well at least sometimes.

• From My People (2022)

  In her softly soaring voice, she went on to tell the hushed and crowded chapel at Boston University, “He probed the most profound depths of life [and] he confronted his own mortality, something few of us are able to do.” She concluded with a few words about the many ways people used power, but also of the proper way Edelin used his, saying, “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” But the most powerful words of all came from Edelin himself—not the caring crusader, healer and teacher, but a poet, whose prescient words in the poem “The Labyrinth of Life,” written a year before he transitioned, adorned the last page of the memorial program: Remember what you learned each day, Use those things to find your way. Exercise your hard-won choice, Give your inner self a voice Walk through the dawn, run through the night. Don’t be paralyzed by fright. The journey’s course will set you free, This journey is your life, you see. Now I’m at my journey’s end. There is one gift to give again. By the end of the service, I was no longer thinking about my own mortality but Ken’s, which left me and so many others with a challenge and a road map to navigate this mortal life. When I Met Dr. KingThe New Yorker APRIL 4, 2018 My one and only encounter with Martin Luther King Jr. was during a chance meeting on what was then called “Sweet Auburn Avenue,” the prosperous hub of black-owned businesses in Atlanta. It was the summer of 1961, when King had earned the love and respect of the city’s young civil rights demonstrators with whom he had marched. I was working as a reporter for the Atlanta Inquirer , an independent black newspaper covering the city’s ongoing segregation, writing stories that mainstream newspapers chose to ignore. By the time I met King, he and a group of local students had triumphed in their effort to end the racist practice of separate and unequal in local restaurants, shops, and schools. King had joined them on the picket line, at sit-ins, and in jail. The attorney Donald Hollowell represented the students in court. The experience would inspire the young people to add a new mantra to their freedom slogans: “King is our leader, Hollowell is our lawyer, and we shall not be moved.” King’s support for the demonstrators in Atlanta led to one of the worst experiences of his career. When the students were released after merchants agreed to desegregate, King was forced to remain in jail and was transported to a prison miles away from Atlanta. He was made to lie in the back of a police vehicle with a dog snarling at him the entire way there. Even after his release, challenges remained throughout the South.