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 Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  I appreciate that Merritt is upfront about her own self-objectification, does not take the easy way out by claiming it as a political stance—claiming that she is weaponizing the female gaze, or sexualizing her own image as a response to the culture’s misogynistic fetishization of women’s bodies. Any such claim would fall flat, empty. She is a thin, conventionally hot, cis white girl. If she created her content within the porn industry, her various identities would afford her opportunities to command the highest attainable rates. She is obsessed with herself, which, if neither particularly admirable nor thought-provoking, is, at the very least, honest. I think she’s aesthetically brilliant, her work pre-dating the grainy aesthetic now ubiquitous on cell phone cameras and OnlyFans. Sepuya’s gaze is political in that he seeks to make Blackness and queerness, often erased from fine art traditions as canonized by museums and galleries, inseparable from the genre of portrait photography. He, too, is aesthetically brilliant, expertly employing metaphor, fragmentation, and pose to discomfit and arouse the viewer simultaneously. Though he takes his work seriously, he is not precious about its existence in different spaces, not worried that it might call up different, lowbrow responses. Interviewing Sepuya, the photographer Giancarlo Montes Santangelo offered up a playful anecdote: “I spotted one of your photographs on Scruff! I chatted with the guy but have no idea what his name is. I thought you’d appreciate the afterlife of the picture. It’s telling though, the images and the relationships they bind are slippery.” Sepuya appreciated this repurposing of his work from the gallery to the gay hook-up app: “Ah I love that story. It happens a lot … I’ve heard stories of friends being across various continents and [initiating] conversations (both in person and on apps) based on recognition from the photographs.” Artists like Sepuya and Merritt make the boundaries between the gallery and the hook-up app, the coffee table book and the smut site, slippery indeed. And the boundaries between facilitating a casual hook-up on the app and facilitating paid sex are slippery, too: in June 2021, a public outcry exploded on social media when it appeared that Apple might remove Grindr and Scruff from their app store, casualties of a new ban on apps that allow “overtly sexual or pornographic material” in the store, defined as “explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings, and including ‘hookup’ apps that may include pornography or be used to facilitate prostitution.” Though Apple quickly clarified that the beloved apps were safe—for now—in spite of their facilitation of nudes-trading, and though Scruff itself explicitly bans “advertising massage or escort services”—I certainly know people who trick on this app, and you certainly do, too.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  In the Hebrew Bible it is placed among the Writings, after Job, as the first of the five Scrolls or Megillot: Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Qoheleth, Esther. This grouping of shorter books is based on their use in the liturgy: Song of Songs is read at Passover, Ruth at the Feast of Weeks, Lamentations on the ninth of Ab (marking the destruction of the temple), Qoheleth at Sukkoth, and Esther at Purim. In Christian Bibles it is usually grouped with Proverbs and Qoheleth on the grounds that all three are supposed to be Solomonic compositions. In fact, however, the Song (or Canticle, from the Latin Canticum in the Vulgate translation) is a unique composition, without any close analogy elsewhere in the biblical corpus. It is a collection of love songs, a celebration of erotic love between man and woman. Because of its exceptional character in the biblical corpus, the Song has always been controversial. Fragments of three copies of the work have been found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Two of these copies appear to have omitted some passages, even though these passages are attested in one or other of the copies. One copy omits the material from 4:8 to 6:11, while another omits the material between 3:5 and 3:9. The reason for these omissions is not clear. There was some dispute among the rabbis as to whether the Song should be included in the canon of Scripture. The great Rabbi Akiba, who died about 135 C.E., is said to have declared that the whole world was not worth the day on which the Song was given to Israel, “for all the scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies” (Mishnah Yadaim 3:5). But the rabbis preserved the sanctity of the Song by interpreting it as an allegory for the love between YHWH and Israel (despite the fact that the Song never mentions God). According to another rabbinic saying, anyone who sang the Song in a banquet house like a profane song would have no share in the world to come (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 101a; Tosefta Sanhedrin 12.10). In Christian tradition the Song was most often read as an allegory for the love between Christ and the church. The association of the Song with Solomon is due to the fact that his name is mentioned six times (1:5; 3:7, 9, 11; 8:11-12), while there are references to a “king” in 1:4, 12, and 7:5. These references led the editor to ascribe the Song to Solomon in the superscription. Solomon is never the speaker in any of the passages that mention him. In some cases, he is introduced in the context of explicit comparison (1:5; 8:11-12). In chapter 3, and in the references to a king, there is most probably an implicit comparison between the beloved and Solomon.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  But the expectation that this is a reliable history is quickly dispelled. In the very first verse we read that Nebuchadnezzar ruled over the Assyrians and lived in Nineveh. What Jewish person in the Second Temple period could possibly have been so ignorant about the king who destroyed Jerusalem? It has been suggested that the author falsified history intentionally for comic effect. More plausibly, he may have wished to associate Nebuchadnezzar with Assyria because the real threat to Judea when the story was written came from Syria, the home of the great persecutor of the Jews in the second century B.C.E., Antiochus Epiphanes. The story begins with a fictional account of a battle between Nebuchadnezzar and the completely fictitious Arphaxad of Media. The western provinces refuse to come to the aid of the Assyrian king, and so he resolves to destroy them. After he has subdued the Medes, he sends his general Holofernes westward. Most of the peoples submit to him, but the Israelites prepare to resist. The fictional town of Bethulia becomes the focal point of the attack (the name recalls Bethel, but also the Hebrew word betulah, “virgin,” which is used several times in connection with Zion). When Holofernes hears of their preparation, he makes inquiries about them from Achior the Ammonite (the name recalls the famous Assyrian sage Ahikar, who was mentioned in the book of Tobit). Achior provides a summary of the history of Israel and assures Holofernes, in Deuteronomic fashion, that Israel will only be conquered if the people have offended their God. Holofernes responds indignantly, “Who is God but Nebuchadnezzar?” (6:2). Achior is bound and left outside Bethulia until he is rescued by the Jews, who welcome him. Holofernes now lays siege to Bethulia. Some of the people lose heart and reproach their rulers for not making peace with the Assyrians. Only at this point, approximately halfway through the narrative in chapter 8, is the heroine Judith introduced. The name Judith means simply “woman of Judah” or “Jewish woman.” It also recalls the name of Judah the Maccabee, the great champion of freedom in the Maccabean era. Judith is a widow of exemplary character and beautiful to boot. She rebukes the people who have proposed surrender and tells them that she is going to do a great deed, but they must not try to find out what she is doing. Before she goes out of Bethulia, she prays, asking God to make her “deceitful words” to the Assyrians successful. Judith now goes to the Assyrian camp.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  now a trophy saint for the Merovingian dynasty. He had become a potent symbol of the triumph of Catholicism over Arianism as far away as Byzantine Italy and the late Arian Ostrogothic kingdom of Ravenna. In the 550s, when the Archbishop of Ravenna celebrated the Byzantine emperor’s confiscation of the great Arian chapel royal in Ravenna (now Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo) and converted it to a place of Catholic worship, he rededicated the building to Martin the Gaulish saint, even though the archbishop’s imperial master in Constantinople could have furnished plenty of Eastern saintly champions against Arianism. It was a significant little gesture to demonstrate that the Western Church was not going to be digested into Eastern Christian practice, even after such a significant victory for Byzantine military power and Catholic Christianity as the reoccupation of Ravenna. In the nave wall mosaics of that church in Ravenna, Martin of Tours still proudly leads the procession of male saints towards the Saviour, even now the church itself has been inconsiderately rededicated to the local hero, St Apollinaris.7 The Frankish Merovingian dynasty survived far longer than any of its Arian or pagan rivals among the former barbarian peoples, and despite its later political divisions and misfortunes, it carried forward in the territories of Francia the sense of a political unit consecrated by a trio of great Catholic Christian saints. Besides Martin of Tours, there was a third-century bishop martyred in northern Gaul in the time of Decius, Dionysius (in later French, Denis); he had been the first bishop of Lutetia, the city which was the forerunner of Paris, which Clovis had refounded as his capital on the island site of the old settlement. These two were joined by an extraordinary woman contemporary of Clovis, a nun called Genovefa (in later French, Geneviève), who had built a tomb for the martyr Denis and is said to have organized Lutetia’s resistance to invading Huns in the mid-fifth century.8 Towards the end of her life, she had a great personal influence on Clovis when Lutetia’s surrender to his armies became inevitable. She probably played a part in his conversion and his new enthusiasm for Denis. When Genovefa died in 512, the Merovingian royal family guaranteed her instant promotion to sanctity by burying her in a new basilica which overlooked their island capital, and which signalled their new-found loyalty to Rome with its dedication to Peter and Paul. Geneviève’s fame eventually saw to the church’s rededication in her honour, and the chilly grandeur of its eighteenth-century successor is now secularized as Paris’s Pantheon, a shrine to the very different intellectual and cultural achievements of Enlightenment France. The three great Catholic saintly patrons of the Frankish dynasty thus comprised two bishops, one a monk who was an ex-soldier, together with a saint highly unusual at the time or indeed at any other: a woman who had pioneered

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  During the schism, there was another event of great significance for the future of western Europe: one powerful barbarian king within the former Western Empire turned his allegiance to Catholic Christianity. His power base was in northern Gaul and his name Clovis; he and his successors took their family name from his grandfather Merovech, to be styled ‘Merovingians’. Becoming king of one branch of the Germanic people known as Franks in 481, Clovis proved to be a successful warlord who extended his family’s power throughout the former provinces of Gaul – henceforward known as Francia, and more or less the area now represented by France. Like other Germanic leaders, he dallied with Arian Christianity, and members of his family certainly chose Arianism.5 However, he married a Catholic wife, and he developed a devotion to the saint of the Catholic Church who had been first a soldier and then a bishop, Martin of Tours. The God of Martin won Clovis his victories, just as that same God had favoured Constantine two centuries before. The fascination of Rome and its local saintly champion tilted Clovis’s beliefs towards his wife’s faith. Bishop Gregory, a great Gallo-Roman aristocrat who was Bishop of Tours, and therefore Martin’s successor as well as the saint’s devout partisan and biographer, records that Clovis was made a consul by the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius, an honour which Clovis lavishly celebrated in Martin’s city of Tours – the date is complicated by problems in interpreting Gregory’s account, but is likely to have been 493 or 503.6 The grant of a consular title could not be a real assertion of Byzantine power, but it represented the Emperor’s eagerness for alliance with an unexpected Catholic Christian ally against Arian rulers in the West; consular dignity was still a potent link between an old world and a new. Over a period of 1,300 years after Clovis’s conversion, eighteen monarchs of what became the kingdom of France were christened with his name, which in its French mutation of the Latin Ludovicus became ‘Louis’. Now the Latin Church could look to a powerful military patron in the West who was neither an Eastern emperor of dubious orthodoxy nor a heretical Arian like Theoderic. It was a century more before the Visigothic kings of Spain withdrew their loyalty from their ancestral Arianism and embraced the Catholic faith which most of their Christian subjects had defiantly retained. The way in which the history of Catholic Christianity has been told obscures just what a near-miss Arian Christianity proved in the West. If the balance of preferences among barbarian monarchs had been swayed by the Spanish Visigoths rather than by Clovis of the Franks, European Christianity could have remained a decentralized Arianism rather than a Roman monarchy; and the consequences are incalculable. No wonder Clovis remained so celebrated. At the heart of the Catholic victory was the dead bishop-saint Martin of Tours,

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  The Mongols’ rise among the various peoples of the steppes was comparatively sudden at the end of the twelfth century. They had their own religious system, which described the way in which sky and earth combined in cosmic consciousness, as do male and female; they also believed that souls animated both people and animals, and survived after death. Given their nomadic lifestyle close to one of the world’s greatest trade routes, they had nevertheless long been familiar with and genially interested in a wide spectrum of other people’s religious beliefs, and they were inclined to give an ear to any religious ideas which took their fancy – Chinese Taoism and Confucianism, Islam, Buddhism and Dyophysite Christianity were the principal wares on offer.29 When in 1007 Christianity gained its first success among the Mongols, it was thanks to the long-dead Syrian St Sergius – a tribute to how this hugely popular military saint had impressed himself on imaginations far away from the site of his Roman martyrdom seven centuries before (see pp. 237–8). Sergius had power, and the Mongols became increasingly interested in power. Perhaps also these warriors who relied for their success on their close bonding found Sergius’s intimate relationship with his soldier-companion Bacchus a good model for their own warfare. It was indeed to one of the most powerful rulers among the Mongols that Sergius appeared in a vision. In or around 1007, the Mongol Khan of the Keraits, adrift in a snowstorm, became convinced that he would die lost and alone, but the saint promised deliverance in return for conversion, and deliverance from the blizzard duly arrived. The Dyophysite clergy who then received the large numbers of Keraits trooping into baptism in the wake of their hugely relieved khan were, with characteristic flexibility, creative in their tolerance of existing Mongol religious beliefs. They were happy to preside over the solemn corporate drinking of mares’ milk blessed on their altar by the Khan himself. Amid the immensity of the Central and East Asian steppes, with few clergy of any persuasion to badger their beliefs into tidiness, Mongols preserved a comfortable mixture of Christianity and tradition. It is clear from archaeological finds that they enjoyed wearing Christian crosses, though they might enliven these with such symbols as the Indian swastika which Buddhists had brought them. Some of their rulers took Christian names; the greatest Mongol ruler of them all, Temüjin, who in 1206 was proclaimed ‘Genghis Khan’ (‘Ruler of the Ocean’), had been the vassal of a Christian Kerait khan and married his overlord’s Christian niece.30 It was through Temüjin’s leadership that, in the space of a few decades, the Mongols became a world power to terrify people from the Mediterranean to the China Sea. His successors were convinced that they had been destined for world supremacy, and for a while it looked as if they were

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  By an intuition of genius, Smith had an intuition of all this, though he was not acquainted with the facts. By a series of ingenious deductions--which need not be reproduced here, for their interest is now only historical[1146]--he thought that he could establish the fact that at the beginning the animal immolated in the sacrifice must have been regarded as quasi-divine and as a close relative of those who immolated it: now these characteristics are just the ones with which the totemic species is defined. Smith even went so far as to suppose that totemism must have known and practised a rite wholly similar to the one we have been studying; he was even inclined to see the original source of the whole sacrificial institution in a sacrifice of this sort.[1147] Sacrifice was not founded to create a bond of artificial kinship between a man and his gods, but to maintain and renew the natural kinship which primitively united them. Here, as elsewhere, the artifice was born only to imitate nature. But in the book of Smith this hypothesis was presented as scarcely more than a theory which the then known facts supported very imperfectly. The rare cases of totemic sacrifice which he cites in support of his theory do not have the significance he attributed to them; the animals which figure in them are not real totems.[1148] But to-day we are able to state that on at least one point the demonstration is made: in fact, we have just seen that in an important number of societies the totemic sacrifice, such as Smith conceived it, is or has been practised. Of course, we have no proof that this practice is necessarily inherent to totemism or that it is the germ out of which all the other types of sacrifices have developed. But if the universality of the rite is hypothetical, its existence is no longer to be contested. Hereafter it is to be regarded as established that the most mystical form of the alimentary communion is found even in the most rudimentary cults known to-day. IV But on another point the new facts at our disposal invalidate the theories of Smith.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Women in the seventeenth century will continue to distinguish themselves essentially in intellectual spheres; social life and culture are spreading; women play a considerable role in salons; by the very fact they are not involved in the construction of the world, they have the leisure to indulge in conversation, the arts, and literature; they are not formally educated, but through discussions, readings, and instruction by private preceptors or public lectures they succeed in acquiring greater knowledge than their husbands: Mlle de Gournay, Mme de Rambouillet, Mlle de Scudéry, Mme de La Fayette, and Mme de Sévigné enjoy great reputations in France; and outside France similar renown is associated with the names of Princess Elisabeth, Queen Christine, and Mlle de Schurman, who corresponded with the whole scholarly world. Thanks to this culture and the ensuing prestige, women manage to encroach on the masculine universe; from literature and amorous casuistry many ambitious women slide toward political intrigue. In 1623 the papal nuncio wrote: “In France all the major events, all the important plots, most often depend on women.” The princesse de Condé foments the “women’s conspiracy”; Anne of Austria readily takes the advice of the women surrounding her; Richelieu lends an indulgent ear to the duchesse d’Aiguillon; the roles played by Mme de Montbazon, the duchesse de Chevreuse, Mlle de Montpensier, the duchess de Longueville, Anne de Gonzague, and many others in the Fronde are well-known. Lastly, Mme de Maintenon is a brilliant example of the influence a skillful woman adviser could wield on state affairs. Organizers, advisers, and schemers, women assure themselves of a highly effective role by oblique means: the princesse des Ursins in Spain governs with more authority but her career is brief. Alongside these great noblewomen, a few personalities assert themselves in a world that escapes bourgeois constraints; a hitherto unknown species appears: the actress. The presence of a woman onstage is noted for the first time in 1545; in 1592 there is still only one; at the beginning of the seventeenth century most of them are actors’ wives; they then become more and more independent both onstage and in their private lives. As far as the courtesan is concerned, after being Phryne or Imperia, she finds her highest incarnation in Ninon de Lenclos: from capitalizing on her femininity, she surpasses it; from living among men, she takes on virile qualities; her independent moral behavior disposes her to independent thinking: Ninon de Lenclos brought freedom to the highest point a woman could at that time.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  centuries as surely as did the works of Augustine (and in the same fashion at one remove from Plato himself); the spirit of serenity in the face of death which it expressed was an impressive reminder to Western clergy and would-be scholars that the philosophers who had been ignorant of Christ were worth listening to with respect. Theoderic and other ‘barbarian’ rulers who did not match his flamboyance could be seen as protectors of the Western Catholic Church against Byzantine emperors who, from the mid-fifth century, frequently alienated and angered Catholic leaders in the West. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had brought Roman–Byzantine relations back from the brink of rupture (see pp. 225–7) and it was not coincidental that around that time the embattled Pope Leo I began regularly using a description of his office which proclaimed him with a modesty intended as a strident assertion of inherited historic authority, ‘the unworthy heir of blessed Peter’ (indignus haeres beati Petri). That formulation did have the additionally useful effect of suggesting that if a pope was indeed unworthy, he still enjoyed the charismatic inheritance of the Apostle, which later proved useful when popes might have to defend actions which looked discreditable.3 In the aftermath of Chalcedon, with successive emperors desperately trying to placate their Miaphysite subjects and risking Chalcedon’s hard-won agreement with the West, relations reached a new nadir in the formal ‘Acacian’ schism of East and West between 482 and 519 (see p. 234). During this break, Pope Gelasius I (492–6) was an aggressive upholder of the Chalcedonian formula and, in what proved despite its brevity to be an energetic and long-remembered tenure of the papal throne, he tried to pull Constantinople back into line, in the tradition of Ambrose’s consecrated bullying of the Emperor Theodosius. Among his various pronouncements, in 494 Gelasius argued in a letter to the Eastern emperor, Anastasius I, that God had provided two ruling authorities in the world, monarchs and bishops. They were charged to use their powers to work together to promote God’s purposes for his people, but ‘of these, the burden of the priests is greater in so far as they will have answer to the Lord for the kings of men themselves at the divine judgement’. The Pope paid all due deference to the emperor’s worldly authority – unlike some of his successors in later centuries – but he asserted that the emperor ought to defer to the clergy in all matters concerning the faith.4 Beyond the immediate occasion of these pronouncements during the schism, Gelasius had laid down a principle which in the West was respected by monarchs and much exploited and extended by future Church leaders, while in the East it never gained the same hold. Only occasionally did Eastern patriarchs get away with saying similar things to the emperor.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  WEI 1272), elsewh, ANON:‏ ||( 104% ץ '112 (הודה || (both‏ יזז: "106 at beginning y‏ )1( "146 ,(8 ||) 1351 ,(ה' DENY‏ ” ₪ הללו |) !113 (פי MBL in cl. with‏ .)ד ג (הללי נִפְשי MNS‏ )|( (שיחי לי'|) 49% ,(הללוהו ‏ הלל ||( !148 at end 104"‏ )2( (הַללוּהו , הללוּדאֶל ||( 150 ”116 ,)7133 יה ||) לש זז 113° *106 105° (supr.),‏ Tore 1 772) 146" Oe Gad 148" 149°‏ ?114 bban nwa 53): add to these (not‏ ||( 150° פל liturgical) *Y-P5D) yro2™, mY DPA mw?‏ also sq.‏ .6 .5 זז לא הַמַתִים ְהַלְלוּיָהּ ,150° min, in Chr, of technical Levitical function‏ to‏ הלל (cf. Lag°™"*°*, who limits this technical‏ priests, using NWN, for a signal to the peo-‏ ple; v. e.g. 0 12% cf. v”), ‘1 Ch16* (with‏ & בְּבָלי ְבָלִים instrumental music, 61. N33‏ and Ne 127( 23" 25° (all‏ ףצ all‏ בּמַצְלְחַים nisin); exercised (apparently) by both priests‏ || ef. v"; by Levites‏ (הדות||) "3 and Levites Ezr‏ Ch 20” (dt13 5p3), 29% (7 1273) in which‏ 2 the people also joined 1 Ch 16%; also 2Ch 5”‏ niny¥n2 61. also v®;‏ וּבְמצְלְחיֶם vds‏ הַשִיר) v8 (appar. of Levites & priests),‏ | (הדות || Ch 23° (Levites) cf. 2Ch 30”‏ 1 מהַלְלִים my‏ בַּבָּלִים לשם sq. ANAM‏ ;)19533 לי' (Levites & priests‏ David speaks in name of‏ ; מורים||) 29% Ch‏ ז people); sq. wap 2 Ch 20% (before the‏ prob. of Levites, cf. v").‏ ; משרְרים army; Nae‏ f. sq. 400. "' Ezr 3" (priests & Levites: var by‏ TI), Ne 5" (people). | ₪. other forms, with‏ band‏ להודות like technical sense, but abs.:‏ Ne 12™ (Levites) cf. 1 Ch 23° 2 Ch‏ בְּמְצָוֶת דּוִיד Ch 31° (appar. priests &‏ 2 (עַדלְשְמְחָה) ”29 3 mwd); y.‏ ולהדות || Levites; “7 nism “yea;‏ (משוּררים 223" Ch 23%(|[ Wein‏ 2 מודיעים ?90 also‏ DPB NYO 2Ch7°(\| MTNA), 3. appar.‏ boast, make one’s boast cf. Qal 2 (sq. 3 zn, of),‏ so, ace. to‏ ; (שמף לְעוּלֶם נוּדָה|) ?44 ץ בָּאלְהִים "סז ץ ה' most, in bad sense, wad MINA->y yer‏ a wicked man boasteth of the desire of his soul,‏ but Che prazseth (/*) for (i.e. in a mercenary‏ Impf.‏ ;הדש הוּללוּ spirit), Pu. Pf. 3 pl.‏ הַהְלְלָה .+ Pr ra; Pe. S50 5 8 2044+ 6t.;‏ יהָפַל- SUE however‏ 975 ל 30 Ez 26" (cf. O1?*‏ accents as Pf., regarding 7 as=relative, v. Sta‏ Gesi™*B-°)-__be praised, 1. human subj.,‏ 91765 be praised, commended Pr 12" (opp. nad 7) ;‏ of maidens, praised, celebrated (in song) 78";‏ pt. (v. supr.) of city, renowned Ez 26". 2.‏ of *, only pt.=gerundive, to be praised, worthy‏ 7 הלל

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  But in reality such possibilities are very unequal; in the sixteenth century, women are still poorly educated. Anne of Brittany summons many women to the court, where previously only men had been seen; she strives to form a retinue of girls of honor: but she is more interested in their upbringing than in their culture. Among women who a little later distinguish themselves by their minds, intellectual influence, and writings, most are noblewomen: the duchess of Retz, Mme de Lignerolles, the Duchess of Rohan and her daughter Anne; the most famous were princesses: Queen Margot and Margaret of Navarre. Pernette Du Guillet seems to have been a bourgeois; but Louise Labé is undoubtedly a courtesan: in any case, she felt free to behave unconventionally.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  Instead of writing chiefly novels and stories for the well-to-do and idle classes, he devoted his wonderful powers principally to clearing up those perplexing problems of human conduct which seem to block the path of progress. Besides some stories (especially short stories for the people, and some folk-stories which he wrote down in order that they may reach those who are not accustomed to go to the peasants for instruction), many essays and letters on important questions, and a drama and a comedy, his chief works during the last twenty years have been these thirteen books: — (1) My Confession . (2) A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology , never yet translated. (3) The Four Gospels Harmonised and Translated , of which two parts out of three have been (not very well) translated. (4) What I Believe , sometimes called My Religion . (5) The Gospel in Brief , a summary of The Four Gospels , and better suited for the general reader than the larger work. (6) What then must we do? Sometimes called What to do? (7) On Life , also called Life : a book not carefully finished, and not easy to read in the original. The existing English translation makes nonsense of it in many places, but a new one has now (1902) been announced by the Free Age Press. (8) The Kreutzer Sonata : a story treating of the sex-question. It should be read with the Afterword , explaining Tolstoy’s views on the subject. (9) The Kingdom of God is Within You . (10) The Christian Teaching : a brief summary of Tolstoy’s understanding of Christ’s teaching. He considers that this book still needs revision, but it will be found useful by those who have understood the works numbered 1, 4, 5 and 6 in this list. (11) What is Art? In Tolstoy’s opinion the best constructed of his books. The profound outcome of fifteen years’ consideration of the problem. (12) Resurrection , a novel begun about 1894, laid aside in favour of what seemed more important work, and completely re-written and published in 1899, for the benefit of the Doukhobórs. (13) What is Religion, and what is its Essence? (Feb. 1902.) The subjects that occupied him were the most important subjects of human knowledge, those which should be (though to-day they are not) emphatically called Science : the kind of science that occupied “Moses, Solon, Socrates, Epictetus, Confucius, Mencius, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, and all those who have taught men to live a moral life.” He examined “the results of good and bad actions,” considered the “reasonableness or unreasonableness of human institutions and beliefs,” “how human life should be lived in order to obtain the greatest well-being for each,” and “what one may and should, and what one cannot and should not believe; how to subdue one’s passions, and how to acquire the habit of virtue.” When Tolstoy began to write boldly and plainly about these things, he quite expected to be persecuted.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  TBO); pt. boastful ones, 00080098 5° (|| MS ופעלי‎ ; 73° 75° (both || ה רשְעים‎ |. Pf ba yr1o%, 1 sf. PRON ""פזז ש‎ 3 mpl. bn consec. Is 62°, sf. ה-לוף‎ 18647 etc.; Impf. -bbm ץש‎ 63° 102"; sf. pen 2 יהללךּ‎ Is 38%, ;"1ף ע וללה‎ rs ON ץ‎ 56°42 = cohort. ץצ אַהַלְלה‎ 69% + 2t., etc.; 1700. fs. הללי‎ W146! 147”; mpl. הללוּ‎ vy 104% + 30 + 6 0 msi נש 156+"22 ץש הללוּהוּ‎ Inf. abs. bb 1 Ch 16*°; esér. הַלַל‎ 29 1425 1-16 6. Chr; Pt. pl. מה"לים‎ + Ch 23*+ 4%. 0-1. praise man or woman, ace. myname ANS ויהללו‎ Gn 12°(J) and they praised her to Pharaoh, cf. Pr 24? 31° 066% TOBIN והמהללים‎ 2 Ch 23” and those praising (shouting acclamations to) the king; v. also מָאד‎ bbad 28 14” (of Absa- lom’s beauty); in bad sense רשע‎ om תורה‎ ay Pr 28% deserters of law praise a wicked man. 2. usually praise אלְהִים‎ 7%, etc.: ₪. sq. acc. of heathen god Ju16™. b. obj.” (DPN); W119 על)‎ on account of), subj. heaven, earth, seas, etc., ~ 69”; qbban YD NN ו‎ 17%; in sum- mons to all creatures to praise 148°"; Is 38" ְהַללְךָּ‎ nyo Fin לא שאול‎ (cf. ץצ‎ 115"); often of public worship in ‘sanctuary, Is 62° (thanks- giving in sanctuary after harvest), cf. 64% y 22% (|| JOB MBOX), v7 35" 109" (both || FTN) 107% )|| (ירוממוהו‎ 845, v. also 146? (|| ay) MIDIS) 149° (c. 3 instr.; || (יזמָרוּ לו‎ ; 0 obj. " שם‎ (in some cases of public worship) 747 148°, 10 2* (thanksgiving after harvest); בּשִיר‎ DYNO y 6" (|| TIN PBN), 145° (|| AZ); further, y 56° AT בַּאלהִים אַהַלל‎ also v4 v"> 47) ביהוה‎ , but cf. Hup Che on 11° as editorial addition; obj. not expressed Foynys ” הַשְמִיעוּ הלל וְאָמְרוּ ה\שע‎ Je317, NEL ש רְנָנוּת יְהַלָלֶדפִּ‎ 5% c. use of Imv. deserves special notice : כַּבְּדוּהו||) 22% ץש הללוּהוּ‎ ; of temple-worship 61. "יצ‎ ; also in summons to angels, sun, moon, ete. (all created things) to praise ;סש 4877551 ד י'‎ of temple-worship 1507 (2 on account of) "ץצ‎ (3), v****°* (all 6. 2 instr.); further Je 205 (|| nb Py), ONS sn 'ְזז ש‎ (addressed to nations, || (שבחוּהו‎ , 148" (created things), #?¥ הללי אַלהיף‎ x47” (|| DON aw SNS). ₪. note esp.: praise ye Yah! הללוּיָה‎ ¥ 135°, liturgical (|| לְשמו‎ 3781); elsewh. always one word vy. Baer’®™, & alw. at beginning or end of (chiefly late), appar. liturgical; הללוּיה‎ 238 ק הלל

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  In 1964, conceptual artist Robert Morris performed Site, alongside Carolee Schneemann, whom he had enlisted to reenact the scene depicted in Edouard Manet’s famous 1863 painting Olympia. In the painting, a naked, white prostitute wearing a flower in her hair, a ribbon around her neck, pearls in her ears, and a bangle on her wrist reclines, legs crossed, breasts bare, arm draped across her body with her hand resting on her thigh to obscure her genitals. She leans against white pillows, white sheets, and cream-colored floral linens. A Black maid, dressed in white, holds a bouquet of flowers open, over Olympia’s legs. A black cat, back arched, stands at the very edge of the cot, looking agitated. The painting was controversial at the time due to Olympia’s profession and direct gaze. In his reenactment, Morris, wearing work clothes and a mask of his own face fabricated by Jasper Johns, deconstructs a large wooden box, removing four-by-eight plywood sheets one at a time, revealing Schneemann inside. She reclines naked on a sheet, wearing only earrings and Olympia’s black ribbon tied around her neck, signifying her harlotry. The pose, gaze, and sheets are the same. A soundtrack of construction noise—jackhammering—plays in the background. Morris returns the plywood sheets, shrouding Schneemann once again. Writing of Morris upon his death in 2019, Schneemann recalls of their working together: During the presentations of Site, my own kinetic theater was obscured by the appreciation of and excitement around your work. I have said that being in Site both historicized and immobilized me. The fact is that it remains a visionary, transformative event that forever reshaped references to historic imagery. You cleaved the specific qualities of painting and sculpture, of movement and stillness.

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

  "In the sense, then, that there exist in the nervous system certain pre-established relations answering to relations in the environment, there is truth in the doctrine of 'forms of intuition'—not the truth which its defenders suppose, but a parallel truth. Corresponding to absolute external relations, there are established in the structure of the nervous system absolute internal relations—relations that are potentially present before birth in the shape of definite nervous connections; that are antecedent to, and independent of, individual experiences; and that are automatically disclosed along with the first cognitions. And, as here understood, it is not only these fundamental relations which are thus predetermined, but also hosts of other relations of a more or less constant kind, which are congenitally represented by more or less complete nervous connections. But these predetermined internal relations, though independent of the experiences of the individual, are not independent of experiences in general: they have been determined by the experiences of preceding organisms. The corollary here drawn from the general argument is that the human brain is an organized register of infinitely-numerous experiences received during the evolution of life, or rather during the evolution of that series of organisms through which the human organism has been reached. The effects of the most uniform and frequent of these experiences have been successively bequeathed, principal and interest; and have slowly amounted to that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain of the infant—which the infant in after-life exercises and perhaps strengthens or further complicates—and which, with minute additions, it bequeaths to future generations. And thus it happens that the European inherits from twenty to thirty cubic inches more brain than the Papuan. Thus it happens that faculties, as of music, which scarcely exist in some inferior human races, become congenital in superior ones. Thus it happens that out of savages unable to count up to the number of their fingers, and speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs, arise at length our Newtons and Shakspeares." This is a brilliant and seductive statement, and it doubtless includes a good deal of truth. Unfortunately it fails to go into details; and when the details are scrutinized, as they soon must be by us, many of them will be seen to be inexplicable in this simple way, and the choice will then remain to us either of denying the experiential origin of certain of our judgments, or of enlarging the meaning of the word experience so as to include these cases among its effects. TWO MODES OF ORIGIN OF BRAIN STRUCTURE.

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

  That 'practice makes perfect' is notorious in the field of motor accomplishments. But motor accomplishments depend in part on sensory discrimination. Billiard-playing, rifle-shooting, tight-rope-dancing, demand the most delicate appreciation of minute disparities of sensation, as well as the power to make accurately graduated muscular response thereto. In the purely sensorial field we have the well-known virtuosity displayed by the professional buyers and testers of various kinds of goods. One man will distinguish by taste between the upper and the lower half of a bottle of old Madeira. Another will recognize, by feeling the flour in a barrel, whether the wheat was grown in Iowa or Tennessee. The blind deaf-mute, Laura Bridgman, has so improved her touch as to recognize, after a year's interval, the hand of a person who once has shaken hers; and her sister in misfortune, Julia Brace, is said to have been employed in the Hartford Asylum to sort the linen of its multitudinous inmates, after it came from the wash, by her wonderfully educated sense of smell. The fact is so familiar that few, if any, psychologists have even recognized it as needing explanation. They have seemed to think that practice must, in the nature of things, improve the delicacy of discernment, and have let the matter rest. At most they have said: "Attention accounts for it; we attend more to habitual things, and what we attend to we perceive more minutely." This answer is true, but too general; it seems to me that we can be a little more precise. There are at least two distinct causes which we can see at work whenever experience improves discrimination: First, the terms whose difference comes to be felt contract disparate associates and these help to drag them apart. Second, the difference reminds us of larger differences of the same sort, and these help us to notice it. Let us study the first cause first, and begin by supposing two compounds, of ten elements apiece. Suppose no one element of either compound to differ from the corresponding element of the other compound enough to be distinguished from it if the two are compared alone, and let the amount of this imperceptible difference be called equal to 1. The compounds will differ from each other, however, in ten different ways; and, although each difference by itself might pass unperceived, the total difference, equal to 10, may very well be sufficient to strike the sense.

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

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

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  In such conditions it is clear how rare it was for a wife to act or merely to make her presence felt: among the working classes, economic oppression cancels out sexual inequality; but it deprives the individual of opportunities; among the nobility and bourgeoisie, the wife is abused because of her sex; she has a parasitic existence; she is poorly educated; she needs exceptional circumstances if she is to envisage and carry out any concrete project. Queens and regents have that rare good fortune: their sovereignty exalts them above their sex; French Salic law denies women the right of access to the throne; but they sometimes play a great role beside their husbands or after their deaths: for example, Saint Clotilda, Saint Radegunda, and Blanche of Castile. Convent life makes woman independent of man: some abbesses wield great power; Héloïse gained fame as an abbess as much as a lover. In the mystical, thus autonomous, relation that binds them to God, feminine souls draw their inspiration and force from a virile soul; and the respect society grants them enables them to undertake difficult projects. Joan of Arc’s adventure is something of a miracle: and it is, moreover, a very brief adventure. But Saint Catherine of Siena’s story is meaningful; she creates a great reputation in Sienna for charitable activity and for the visions that testify to her intense inner life within a very normal existence; she thus acquires the necessary authority for success generally lacking in women; her influence is invoked to hearten those condemned to death, to bring back to the fold those who are lost, to appease quarrels between families and towns. She is supported by the community that recognizes itself in her, which is how she is able to fulfill her pacifying mission, preaching submission to the pope from city to city, carrying on a vast correspondence with bishops and sovereigns, and finally chosen by Florence as ambassador to go and find the pope in Avignon. Queens, by divine right, and saints, by their shining virtues, are assured of support in the society that allows them to be men’s equal. Of others, a silent modesty is required. The success of a Christine de Pizan is due to exceptional luck: even so, she had to be widowed and burdened with children for her to decide to earn her living by her pen.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  And living in a country where Chinese, Malay, and Indian cuisines are equally (and proudly) represented, they are accustomed to eating well. When they talk about food they tend to know what they're talking about. They are not snobs and are far more likely to gush about a bowl of noodles at a Mom-and-Pop hawker stand than to be concerned with the new "hot" place. I learned this the hard way, when addressing a black-tie gathering of well-heeled Singaporeans in a swank hotel's ballroom. There was a question from the floor, a fan wanting to know my preferred spot for the local specialty, chicken rice. When I sheepishly admitted that I had not yet tried it, the entire room of five hundred people erupted in loud (if good-natured) boos. This was followed by near anarchy, as the crowd then began arguing passionately among themselves over which of the hundreds of chicken-rice places they should recommend to the pathetically ignorant American chef-author. Chicken rice, by the way, in case you didn't know, is, basically, boiled chicken and white rice. It is to Singaporeans what chopped liver, pastrami, or pizza is to New Yorkers. Everyone has their favorite. Discussing the subject, people tend to get enthusiastic, even contentious. The question of who's got the best could very easily lead to a fistfight—were fighting not illegal (and therefore unthinkable) in Singapore. The next morning, I called my friend K. F. Seetoh, the "guru" behind the Makansutra Guide, a sort of better-than-Zagat guide to Singapore's hawker stands, eating houses, and street food. Eateries are graded not with stars or numbers, but by rice bowls signifying "good," "very good," "excellent"—and the Singlish "Don't try, regret ah!" and the ultimate accolade, "Die, die must try!" Seetoh pointed me to Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice, a closet-size food stall in the bustling Maxwell Road Food Centre, generally accepted as serving one of the very best versions. I ordered a plate from the tiny one-room stall with the head-on chickens hanging from hooks in the window and settled down to eat a heap of soft, pillowy white rice with pale, juicy chunks of chicken piled in the center. A little cucumber, some supersticky spicy hoisin-style sauce, a little grated ginger, and a garlic pepper sauce are served on the side. You mix it all together to fit personal preferences—and they are as varied as the imagination. Looking around at other tables in the long hallway between rows of brightly lit hawker stands, I watched locals eagerly drizzling, dipping, and mixing the basic elements into personalized concoctions, no two plates the same. The dish is remarkable for such a simple thing, almost baby food for adults, a bone-deep comfort food for locals, a reassuring trip down memory lane with every mouthful. And at Tian Tian it was, as advertised, wonderful. Next time I'm asked the question, I'll be ready with a very respectable answer.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  The union of science and the military in all recent modern history, during World War II, and, as one more example, in present Indian-Pakistan relations, shows the first; and the almost universal support of their nations by the religious groups of the twentieth century validates the second. Without denying Niebuhr’s point, I might add that, nonetheless, during that period the churches of Japan, Germany, England, and the United States had a better record challenging the evils of the state than did the academic faculties, the scientific laboratories, or the educational administrations in those same communities. These affirmations represented the main points of Niebuhr’s early political works. They are clearly seen in the little classic Moral Man and Immoral Society . As is evident, there is little theology here, and even less reference to the biblical view. In fact his interpretations of these insights retain many of the older, liberal assumptions. Although these insights are fascinating, one cannot help but wonder what sort of theological perspective might be implied in them. This theological perspective began to appear in the second half of the decade. First came Beyond Tragedy in 1936, a series of sermons setting these insights into a so-called “neo-orthodox” interpretation of the Bible. Niebuhr had begun to discover the biblical and theological grounds for his empirical analysis of social affairs. Then, of course, came the classics of his mature work: Volume I, on the Nature of Man , published in 1941, and Volume II, on the Destiny of Man , in 1943. In these books the developed theology congruent with his political insights, what Niebuhr called “biblical faith” or the “biblical view,” was fully elaborated. Granting the impact and importance of Moral Man and Immoral Society , the rest of my remarks will be devoted to describing in part the theological viewpoint represented in these later volumes. This is necessary not only to understand the full compass of Niebuhr’s moral and political thought but also to show points of continuity and discontinuity in his work. Despite Niebuhr’s well-known emphasis on the reality and universality of sin, he thoroughly believed in the creativity, artistic and intellectual power, and moral possibilities of the human spirit—what made each human unique and valuable, history full of novel creations and events, and community a locus of justice and of love. Niebuhr is surely best known for his sharp critique of modern optimism, for it is, to him, “naive” belief in social and moral progress. That point was already made in Moral Man and Immoral Society . Nevertheless—as he was possibly not so well aware—he accepted much of modernity’s understanding of the human: its capacity for creating the new, for enacting novelty in history, and its capacity for creative progress in knowledge, in understanding, and even in moral principles. Because of this human capacity, he said, history is constantly changing and full of indeterminate possibilities for development. Niebuhr identified this creative spiritual power as the imago Dei , the image of God in human beings.