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 The Power of Myth (1988)

  That will certainly give you some clues. In my own life I took my instruction from reading Thomas Mann and James Joyce, both of whom had applied basic mythological themes to the interpretation of the problems, questions, realizations, and concerns of young men growing up in the modern world. You can discover your own guiding- myth motifs through the works of a good novelist who himself understands these things. MOYERS: That’s what intrigues me. If we are fortunate, if the gods and muses are smiling, about every generation someone comes along to inspire the imagination for the journey each of us takes. In your day it was Joyce and Mann. In our day it often seems to be movies. Do movies create hero myths? Do you think, for example, that a movie like Star Wars fills some of that need for a model of the hero? CAMPBELL: I’ve heard youngsters use some of George Lucas’ terms—“the Force” and “the dark side.” So it must be hitting somewhere. It’s a good sound teaching, I would say. MOYERS: I think that explains in part the success of Star Wars . It wasn’t just the production value that made that such an exciting film to watch, it was that it came along at a time when people needed to see in recognizable images the clash of good and evil. They needed to be reminded of idealism, to see a romance based upon selflessness rather than selfishness. CAMPBELL: The fact that the evil power is not identified with any specific nation on this earth means you’ve got an abstract power, which represents a principle, not a specific historical situation. The story has to do with an operation of principles, not of this nation against that. The monster masks that are put on people in Star Wars represent the real monster force in the modern world. When the mask of Darth Vader is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual. What you see is a strange and pitiful sort of undifferentiated face. MOYERS: What’s the significance of that? CAMPBELL: Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. He’s a robot. He’s a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in terms of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? It doesn’t help to try to change it to accord with your system of thought. The momentum of history behind it is too great for anything really significant to evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being. That’s something else, and it can be done.

• From Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  Freud’s followers were both more prescriptive and more certain than he was. Psychoanalysis, in the hands of Karl Abraham, Marie Bonaparte, Karen Horney, and Eduard Hitschmann and Edmund Bergler, depicted natural femininity as involving a desire for vaginal intercourse, domesticity and motherhood. A healthy femininity required vaginal orgasm, while an immature sexuality privileged clitoral pleasure, itself associated with signs of supposed masculinity or refusal of femininity, such as lesbianism, feminist militancy, or the desire to pursue an education or work outside the home. For these neo-Freudians, clitoral repression and vaginal maturation were the bedrock of proper femininity. These accounts of female sexuality have, understandably, provoked intense hostility in the decades since. Their refutation was central to the emerging women’s movement in the 1960s and 70s – a movement gathering energy at the time of Masters and Johnson’s publications, and which harnessed the sexologists’ findings with great enthusiasm. For a while, Masters and Johnson’s sexology, which observed and counted women’s sexual pleasures, yielding statistics of their clitoral orgasms, became one of the key resources in the feminist toolbox. Not all feminists, however, were on board with excitedly declaiming the revolutionary potential of sexual pleasure, or the liberatory significance of the clitoris. Black feminists such as Frances Beal, Linda La Rue, and bell hooks rightly pointed out that white feminists failed to acknowledge the privileges implicit in seeing sexuality as a primary source of identity. Black feminism’s investment in sexual pleasure was, they argued, complicated by the egregious history of sexual and economic exploitation of black women and the experimental use of poor women’s bodies, as in the testing of birth control pills on Puerto Rican women, and the enforced sterilization of black women. Nonetheless, sexology was alluring to feminists such as Anne Koedt and Ti-Grace Atkinson, who saw great emancipatory potential in Masters and Johnson’s work. In Koedt’s ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’, a short but hugely influential essay first distributed in mimeographed copies and later widely anthologized, she wrote that if certain sexual positions now defined as ‘standard’ are not mutually conducive to orgasm, they should ‘no longer be defined as standard’. Clitoral orgasm showed that sexual pleasure could be had from either men or women, making heterosexuality ‘not absolute, but an option’. Since men, she wrote, ‘have orgasms essentially by friction with the vagina’, rather than the clitoral area, women have as a result ‘been defined sexually in terms of what pleases men’.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  They are therefore very important words, for through them we shall learn something of the power of God in action in Christ, in the world, and in the lives of men. These words came into Christianity with a long and an important history and their history goes a long way towards helping us to understand their Christian flavour and usage. So then, first of all, let us study their usage in classical Greek. We may best get at their classical meaning by studying the word energos, which does not occur in the NT at all, but which has in it the germs of all the other meanings. Energos is an adjective. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia (1.4.4) there is a passage where Socrates is discussing the actions of a man who was prepared to reverence the great writers and the great artists, but who was not prepared to reverence the gods. ‘Which do you think,’ he demands, ‘deserve the greater admiration, the creators of phantoms without sense and motion, or the creators of living, intelligent, active (energos) human beings?’ Energos describes that which is radiantly and vividly alive. Herodotus (8.26) tells of certain Arcadian deserters who came to the Persians, because they were in need of food and wished to be employed (energos). Energos describes action in opposition to inaction. Energos is used to describe someone who is on duty. Plato in The Laws (674b) lays it down: ‘Magistrates, during their year of office, and pilots and judges, while on duty, should taste no wine at all.’ Energos describes a man on duty in his profession or calling. Energos frequently has a military connexion. Thucydides speaks on one occasion of the Athenian fleet as having the largest number of ships the Athenians ever had on active service (energos) (Thucydides, 3.17). Xenophon tells how Cyrus made an example of certain men, and said that such men must be weeded out, if we are to keep our army energos, industrious, efficient, fit for active service (Xenophon, Cyropædia 2.2.23). Polybius uses energos to describe a vigorous attack (4.63.8); an effective weapon (1.40.12); a march made with rapidity (5.8.34). Energos is frequently used of land which is cultivated and therefore productive. Plutarch speaks of a plain producing enough to feed tens of thousands (Caesar 58). He speaks of the law of Peisistratus against idleness ‘in consequence of which the country became more productive (energos) and the city more tranquil’ (Solon 31). Xenophon uses energos to describe cultivated as opposed to uncultivated land. Energos is used to describe a mine which produces minerals and which is not worked out. It is used of money, capital, which is not lying idle but which is put out to produce interest. In the papyri energos is used to describe a mill which is in working order. The Septuagint uses energos for a working day as opposed to the Sabbath when work was forbidden (Ezek. 46.1).

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  I met him one memorable afternoon at Stanford in early February 2014. He’d just published an op-ed titled “How Long Have I Got Left?” in The New York Times, an essay that would elicit an overwhelming response, an outpouring from readers. In the ensuing days, it spread exponentially. (I’m an infectious diseases specialist, so please forgive me for not using the word viral as a metaphor.) In the aftermath of that, he’d asked to come see me, to chat, to get advice about literary agents, editors, the publishing process—he had a desire to write a book, this book, the one you are now holding in your hands. I recall the sun filtering through the magnolia tree outside my office and lighting this scene: Paul seated before me, his beautiful hands exceedingly still, his prophet’s beard full, those dark eyes taking the measure of me. In my memory, the picture has a Vermeer-like quality, a camera obscura sharpness. I remember thinking, You must remember this, because what was falling on my retina was precious. And because, in the context of Paul’s diagnosis, I became aware of not just his mortality but my own. We talked about a lot of things that afternoon. He was a neurosurgical chief resident. We had probably crossed paths at some point, but we hadn’t shared a patient that we could recall. He told me he had been an English and biology major as an undergraduate at Stanford, and then stayed on for a master’s in English literature. We talked about his lifelong love of writing and reading. I was struck by how easily he could have been an English professor—and, indeed, he had seemed to be headed down that path at one point in his life. But then, just like his namesake on the road to Damascus, he felt the calling. He became a physician instead, but one who always dreamed of coming back to literature in some form. A book, perhaps. One day. He thought he had time, and why not? And yet now time was the very thing he had so little of.

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  Doesn’t get jealous, wants to have sex frequently with cuddles before, during and after, enjoys sex with others with and without my participation, is into a wide range of sexual activities including BDSM, has no hang-ups about safer-sex practices, is open and honest about what she wants in and out of bed, respects the hell out of me. Hmmm. Butch. Tall. Sweet, kind, strong, intelligent, humorous, loving, open, honest, warm, interested in life, slightly introverted, thoughtful, sexy!!! Oh, and open to being in a poly relationship of course… My ideal female sex partner would be unselfconscious about her body. She’d be uninhibited, and adventurous. She’d know she was beautiful, and she’d approach sex as a way of expressing the joy of being a physical creature. I can’t help but think of the way cats move in their bodies—a mixture of pride and pleasure. My ideal woman would be like that. A free spirit. What Kind of Partnership Do You Want?The idea of choosing what kind of relationship you want may be quite foreign. After all, how many models of sexual partnership are we offered? Many of us fall into relationships very easily. Sometimes we end up in a sexual relationship exactly like the one we told our best friend we wouldn’t settle for. How does that happen? Well, there are many reasons for repeating past mistakes. And many sources of help for sorting out our histories and motivations. In the meantime, think about what you want for your future. What kind of relationship do you want? Do you long for a committed partner who shares your home as well as your bed? Or does the thought of “till death do us part” make you break out in hives? Would you like home, lover, family—but not monogamy? Monogamy, but not cohabitation? Not interested in marriage right now, thank-you-very-much? Do you want to date without pressure? Is your joy in dating over time, discovering a partner’s particular brand of sexuality—without any expectation, implicit or otherwise, that if you care about her you’ll want the relationship to go further? If monogamy is your goal, how do you define it? Is it monogamy if you have sex with only one partner in real time, but have online play partners? Or flirt in chatrooms? Does an occasional romp at a play party count? What about a lap dance at a charity strip show? Or when you’re out of town on business? And is this arrangement explicit—something you’ve discussed with your partner—or something you think she knows-but-doesn’t-want-to-know? Does your relationship leave room for you to fantasize freely, even when your partner is not in the starring role—or do you rein in your imagination? I perform as a drag king and flirting is part of the show. I get offers for sex with women I am REALLY attracted to and wish I could keep my current relationship with my partner and have some sex on the side.

• From The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000)

  In summary, evolution sometimes favors courtship equilibria in which animals are very generous to others. This does not mean that evolution favors truly selfless altruism, simply that the hidden benefit of generosity is reproductive rather than nepotistic or reciprocal. In principle, evolution could sustain very high levels of altruism by rewarding the altruistic with high social status and improved mating opportunities. Without sexual selection, generosity to unrelated individuals unable to reciprocate would be very unlikely to evolve. With sexual selection, such generosity can evolve easily as long as the capacity for generosity reveals the giver’s fitness. In our species, the fact that we find kindness and generosity so appealing in sexual partners suggests that our ancestors converged on a rare and wonderful equilibrium in the game of courtship. LeadershipHigh status among chimpanzees and gorillas does not depend only on physical dominance. It also depends on an individual’s ability to prevent fights among other group members, to mediate conflicts, to initiate reconciliations, and to punish transgressors. Frans de Waal observed that one of the chimpanzees in Arnhem Zoo named Yeroen sustained his high status late into life by being good at this sort of moral leadership. Yeroen had the social intelligence to notice when trouble was developing between group members, and the social skills to intervene in just the right way to defuse tension and maintain group harmony. He was remarkably impartial, not allowing his own social relationship and consortships to bias his peacekeeping. Other individual males could beat Yeroen in a fight, but his high status was maintained through popular support and respect. Chimpanzees have apparently transformed the ancient tradition of primate dominance hierarchies into a status system based on moral leadership. We used to imagine that this was a distinctively human achievement, but it is not. If chimpanzees and gorillas respect peace-keeping and policing ability, and modern humans do too, then it is likely that our common ancestor five million years ago did as well. Status based on moral leadership is a legacy of the great apes. For at least five million years, our ancestors have been striving to attain status through their moral leadership, rather than just through their physical strength. But what exactly does “high status” mean? In primates, it generally brings greater reproductive success, which depends on greater sexual attractiveness. Status is not a piece of territory that can be taken by force. It must be granted by others, based on their likes and their dislikes, their respect and their disrespect. “Status” is a statistical abstraction across the social and sexual preferences of the members of one’s group. If our ancestors attained high status through moral leadership, that meant moral leadership was socially and sexually attractive. It was favored by social choice and sexual choice. Because sexual choices have so much more evolutionary power than social choices about friends, grooming partners, and food-sharers, we come to this conclusion: moral leadership evolved through sexual choice in both chimpanzees and humans.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 6 (1300 – 1800) (2009)

  perspectives on Latin language and culture. They developed great enthusiasm for the first-century-BCE politician-turned-philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (‘Tully’ to his English-speaking admirers). Civic humanists appreciated Cicero’s detailed discussion of government, disregarding the inconvenient fact that he had been a very unsuccessful politician, and when in 1421 Cicero’s treatise on oratory was rediscovered in the cathedral library at Lodi in northern Italy, the new book sealed his reputation as the ideal model for powerful and persuasive Latin prose. It became the ambition of every cultivated young scholar to write just like Cicero, given inevitable adjustments like newly coined words for printing, gunpowder and cannon-fire.42 This humanist literary style was very different from the Latin which scholastic philosophers and theologians had spoken and written over the previous few centuries; one can tell a humanist prose composition from a scholastic text merely by seeing how the sentences are constructed and the sort of vocabulary used. The contrast became even more obvious when humanist manuscript writers painstakingly mimicked the ‘Roman’ characteristics of what they took to be ancient script – in fact, it was the minuscule used by Carolingian copyists of older manuscripts in that earlier ‘Renaissance’ (see pp. 352–3). Some southern European printers then imitated their script, producing a typeface similar to what you are reading here, and completely unlike the Gothic type which other printers used in imitation of medieval manuscript ‘bookhand’. A further imitation of a cursive, more rapidly written script which humanists developed from minuscule produced an ‘italic’ form of the new typefaces. This tribute to a slightly misunderstood past was paralleled in the Renaissance’s architectural and artistic revolution, which began in Italy in the fifteenth century and gradually spread northwards over the next two centuries. The visual forms of ancient buildings, sculpture, paintings and gardens were more and more accurately imitated as part of the effort to bring back to life the lost world of Greece and Rome – even for Christian church buildings - at a time when Orthodox Church art was turning away from such experiments in naturalism, and single-mindedly developing a contrasting ancient artistic and architectural tradition deriving from Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (see pp. 495–6). Among the flood of new and strange material from the ancient world, which might or might not be valuable if put to use, was a set of writings about religion and philosophy purporting to have been written by a divine figure from ancient Egypt, Hermes Trismegistus. In fact they had been compiled in the first to third centuries CE, at much the same time as early Christianity was emerging. Some were then codified in Greek in a work now known as the Corpus Hermeticum, and others later translated into Latin and Arabic. Some dealt with forms of

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  I grew up in Chicago and live here still, so it was much more interesting for me to explore what happened right here. Chicago is, in a way, the great love of my life. I’ll never get tired of it and I’ll never get tired of writing about it. Oddly, the origin of my novel was something that’s now only a small part of it: the art scene in Paris between the two world wars. I’ve always been fascinated by that time, and by the “École de Paris” set—the young artists who came to Paris from around the world—and although that shrank to a subplot of the novel, something we hear stories about but don’t see firsthand, it’s still there and still important. The sections in 2015 with Fiona were actually a later addition to the story. I’d written about 150 pages thinking the book was just going to be about the ’80s before I realized I needed to go back and forth in time. Your characters in The Great Believers feel like very real, dynamic people. What or who inspired your creation of these characters? I’ve never based a character on a real person, but there are slivers of different real people (and huge chunks of myself) in every character I write. In The Great Believers , some of those slivers came from the details that people shared with me about themselves or their friends back in the ’80s, and some came from elsewhere. These characters ended up feeling real to me in a way that I’ve never quite experienced before in my previous novels or stories. In particular, my main character, Yale Tishman, is someone I keep thinking of like a friend I just lost. When I get good news about the novel, I wish I could tell him about it. That might make me sound unbalanced, but it was important to my process that I got to the point of thinking of him as a real person. As a cisgender heterosexual woman, why was this an important story for you to tell? How are you able to lift up the voices of the LGBTQA+ community? I thought (and stressed) a lot about whether it was appropriate for me to tell a story about AIDS, and ultimately I felt I needed to satisfactorily answer two questions: 1) Could I do a good job, do this story justice? 2) Would this book detract from the narratives of those who lived through this crisis, or help readers discover those stories? The answer to No. 1 was that I could do it with relentless research, and I hope I’ve indeed done justice to the story. The answer to No. 2 was that my novel is much more likely, if it’s successful, to engender further discussion and writing about AIDS than to squelch it. The way commercial publishing works, a novel’s success means more presses will be willing to back a similar project in the future.

• From The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000)

  In 1995, Irwin Tessman became the first to argue that sexual selection shapes morality. He pointed out that human generosity goes beyond the demands of kinship and reciprocity. Perhaps generosity works as a Zahavian handicap that displays fitness, and thus evolved through sexual selection. Amotz Zahavi has argued since the 1970s that apparent altruism could bring hidden reproductive benefits through the social status that it inspires. Anthropologist James Boone recently combined Zahavi’s handicap theory and Veblen’s conspicuous consumption theory to explain costly, conspicuous displays of magnanimity. While Tessman and I focus on direct mate choice for moralistic displays during courtship, Zahavi and Boone emphasize the indirect reproductive benefits of high status. Both effects were probably important during human evolution. In theory, mate choice could be the single most powerful moral filter from one generation to the next. It could favor almost any degree of altruism or heroism, compensating for almost any risk to survival. If, for example, all females refused to mate with any males who ate meat, any genes predisposing individuals to vegetarianism (however indirectly) would spread like wildfire. The species would turn vegetarian no matter what survival benefits were conferred by meat-eating, as long as the sexual selection pressure against meat-eating held. Natural selection for selfishness would be impotent against sexual selection for moral behavior. Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata of 411 B.C. illustrated the moral power of female sexual choice. Lysistrata convinced the other women of Athens to stop having sex with their men until the men stopped waging the Peloponnesian war. The women barricaded themselves in the Acropolis, while (in the original staging of the play) the sex-starved men wandered around with ever-larger leather phalluses, gradually realizing that military victory becomes meaningless without the prospect of sex. Although some women were also tempted to break the sex strike—one even tried to sneak off to a brothel—they outlasted the men. Lysistrata’s sex-strike succeeded in forcing the Athenian men to make peace with the Spartans. Her strategy would have worked equally well over evolutionary time: female sexual preferences for peace-keepers could have reduced male belligerence and aggressiveness. This “better morality through mate choice” hypothesis prompts several questions. Why would mate choice mechanisms evolve to favor displays of generosity, fair play, good manners, or heroism? Why do we consider such displays especially “moral,” as compared with other courtship displays? Why do our judgments of different courtship displays feel so different? Bodily ornaments seem to provoke lust, artistic displays induce aesthetic feelings, and moralistic displays attract admiration. This chapter does not answer all these questions, but may chart some new territory in the evolution of human morality. We’ll start with a simple example of how mate choice can favor costly behaviors that provide for the common good.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Every serious reader of erotica has remarked about Miller that he is probably the only author in history who writes about such things with complete ease and naturalness. Lawrence never quite rid himself of his puritanical salaciousness, nor Joyce; both had too much religion in their veins. It is funny to recollect that Lawrence thought Ulysses a smutty book and Joyce thought Lady Chatterley a smutty book. Both were right. But at least they tried to free themselves from literary morality. Miller’s achievement is miraculous: he is screamingly funny without making fun of sex, the way Rabelais does. (Rabelais is, of course, magnificent; so is Boccaccio; but both write against the background of religion, like Joyce and Lawrence.) Miller is accurate and poetic in the highest degree; there is not a smirk anywhere in his writings. Miller undoubtedly profited from the mistakes of his predecessors; his aim was not to write about the erotic but to write the whole truth about the life he knew. This goal demanded the full vocabulary and iconography of sex, and it is possible that he is the first writer outside the Orient who has succeeded in writing as naturally about sex on a large scale as novelists ordinarily write about the dinner table or the battlefield. I think only an American could have performed this feat. We are dealing with the serious question of banned books, burned books, and fear of books in general. America has the most liberal censorship laws in the West today, but we have done no more than make a start. I have always been amused by the famous decision of Judge Woolsey who lifted the ban on Ulysses , although it was certainly a fine thing to do and it is a landmark we can be proud of. Woolsey said various comical things, such as that he could not detect the “leer of the sensualist” in Joyce’s book, and that therefore (the logic of it escapes me) it is not pornographic. In excusing the use of old Saxon words he noted that Joyce’s “locale was Celtic and his season Spring.” And, in order to push his decision through, Judge Woolsey stated that Ulysses “did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts,” and he closed his argument with the elegant statement that although the book is “somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.” Emetic means tending to produce vomiting and I doubt that Joyce savored that description of his masterpiece. The implication, of course, is that vomiting is good for you, and lustful thoughts not. Now everyone who has read Ulysses knows that the book is based largely on the lustful thoughts and acts of its characters and that Joyce spared no pains to represent these thoughts and deeds richly and smackingly. Ulysses is, since the Judge used the word, a pretty good aphrodisiac, partly because of Joyce’s own religious tensions.

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

  I'd spent so much time in the UK by this point, I was starting to sound like Madonna. "Where's the loo?" "I have to stop and buy some fags." "Brilliant!" "I have to go have a slash . . ." MY MANHATTAN Years later, this piece still stands as a decent visitor's guide to New York. I'd add the restaurants Masa and Per Se in the Time Warner Center on the high end, and maybe Corner Bistro for burgers on the low. Siberia still reigns supreme among dives, though some weekend nights lately are reserved for an all-male leather crowd. Better phone ahead. HARD-CORE This is an unabashed blow job of an article. Like everybody I've introduced to her, I'm hopelessly, gushily a fan of Gabrielle Hamilton. I neglected to mention in this article exactly how good a writer she is. Two subsequent pieces she wrote for the New Yorker and for the New York Times Magazine were genius. Not too long after this article was written, she got a monster-size advance from a major publishing house to write what will presumably be a memoir. It will no doubt be better and more interesting than Kitchen Confidential. Every day that Gabrielle Hamilton likes me? It's reason to live. WHEN THE COOKING'S OVER I'm sure Ruth Reichl got a lot of angry mail from Gourmet readers about this piece. It's something of a departure from their once traditional territory of bundt cake recipes and restaurant roundups. There's a dark, perverse streak to Ms. Reichl I'm very grateful for. I mean, the scuzzball strip club, the Clermont Lounge, in the pages of Gourmet? I think that's a first. THE COOK'S COMPANIONS Some of my favorite books on The Life. To which I'd now add Ludwig Bemelmans's Hotel Bemelmans. When I finally became aware of it, it was both delightful and dismaying to discover that I'd done nothing new when I wrote Kitchen Confidential —that Bemelmans had been there before me, and done it better and with more authority. CHINA SYNDROME China is great. China is BIG. China is FUN. And it's hugely frustrating to know that even if I dedicated the rest of my life to the project, I'd never see all of it. There's little question in my mind that as China continues to emerge as an economic superpower, and as we find ourselves increasingly dependent on its manufacturing—and its credit line—that it will eventually pretty much rule the world. To which I say, "Welcome to our future masters!" With China as our landlord, we will, at least, be eating a hell of a lot better. NO SHOES Also written for a Brit magazine, hence the reference to the loathsome and inexplicably popular Michael Winner—a shit film director turned shittier food columnist—and the Gordon Ramsay references and the egregious use of Britspeak. I stand by my Sans Footwear Theory, though. Food indeed does taste better with sand between your toes. THE LOVE BOAT Happier times . . .

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Dickey’s story had its giant appeal because the search he described found expression elsewhere in American society. NASCAR offered the same kind of allure, as Tom Wolfe wrote in Esquire . Men without inhibitions who lived for the momentary pleasure of danger had no fear of the consequences of their actions. North Carolinian driver Junior Johnson was not just a “hero a whole people or class can identify with,” he was a “rare breed” who had gone from whiskey running in the isolated hills and hollows of his home state to stock car racing. He had it all: money, a split-level house, a poultry business. He might have exchanged his overalls for a windbreaker with the collar up, and “Slim Jim” white pants, but this “breed of old boy” proved something major by driving at 175 miles per hour with a kind of madness that was “raw and hillbilly.” That was the appeal. 23 The macho star of Deliverance, Burt Reynolds, went on to make a southern- accented film that was an homage to the stock car racer’s way of life. In Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Reynolds’s character lived for the chase and ran from the law, while his female companion (played by Sally Field) was a runaway bride— both of them rejecting civilization’s restraints. The Reynolds of this film was a modern-day squatter like good old Sug, respected because he refused to knuckle down and join the daily grind of working to get ahead. Smokey and the Bandit was the second highest grossing film in 1977, but most of its popularity was in the South and Midwest. Adding to the mix, in 1979, CBS launched The Dukes of Hazzard, the plots of which revolved around rebel moonshiners decked out in a bright red racing car, and a sexy kissing cousin named Daisy, whose trademark was her high-cut jean shorts. Denver Pyle was cast as Uncle Jesse, known for his overalls and countrified homilies; Pyle had previously played Briscoe Darling Jr., the surly father of a musical hillbilly clan in The Andy Griffith Show . 24 Wannabe bandits were among the thousands of spectators at NASCAR who launched into rebel yells, drank too much, and ogled the floozy on the float with her “big blonde hair and blossomy breasts” and cheap Dallas Cowgirl outfit. They embraced a certain species of freedom—the freedom to be a boor, out in the open and without regrets. The “upscale rednecks,” the rising white trash middle class, identified with these hillbilly racers, men who had escaped the overalls and gained as much respect as could be had in accepting wads of cash from Detroit. Class structure had not changed appreciably for the rural poor: money may have made a hillbilly or two reputable, but those left in the hills were not reaping any social benefits. “Upscale rednecks” had no trouble spotting those below them in their rearview mirrors. 25

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

  D’Ailly followed Ockam as a nominalist. To his writings in the departments of philosophy, theology and Church government he added works on astronomy and geography and a much-read commentary on Aristotle’s meteorology.380 His work on geography, The Picture of the World,—imago mundi,—written 1410, was a favorite book with Columbus. A printed copy of it containing marginal notes in the navigator’s own hand is preserved in the biblioteca Colombina, Seville. This copy he probably had with him on his third journey to America, for, in writing from Hayti, 1498, he quoted at length the eighth chapter. Leaning chiefly upon Roger Bacon, the author represented the coast of India or Cathay as stretching far in the direction of Europe, so that, in a favorable wind, a ship sailing westwards would reach it in a few days. This idea was in the air, but it is possible that it was first impressed upon the mind of the discoverer of the New World by the reading of D’Ailly’s work. Humboldt was the first to show its value for the history of discovery.381 § 23. John Gerson, Theologian and Church Leader. In John Gerson, 1363–1429, we have the most attractive and the most influential theological leader of the first half of the fifteenth century. He was intimately identified with the University of Paris as professor and as its chancellor in the period of its most extensive influence in Europe. His voice carried great weight in the settlement of the questions rising out of the papal schism. Jean Charlier Gerson, born Dec. 14, 1363, in the village of Gerson, in the diocese of Rheims, was the oldest of twelve children. In a letter to him still extant,382 his mother, a godly woman, pours out her heart in the prayer that her children may live in unity with each other and with God. Two of John’s brothers became ecclesiastics. In 1377 Gerson went to Paris, entering the College of Navarre. This college was founded by Johanna, queen of Navarre, 1304, who provided for 3 departments, the arts with 20 students, philosophy with 30 and theology with 20 students. Provision was made also for their support, 4 Paris sous weekly for the artists, 6 for the logicians and 8 for the theologians. These allowances were to continue until the graduates held benefices of the value respectively of 30, 40 and 60 pounds. The regulations allowed the theological students a fire, daily, from November to March after dinner and supper for one half-hour. The luxury of benches was forbidden by a commission appointed by Urban V. in 1366. On the festival days, the theologians were expected to deliver a collation to their fellow-students of the three classes. The rector at the head of the college, originally appointed by the faculty of the university, was now appointed by the king’s confessor. The students wore a special dress and the tonsure, spoke Latin amongst themselves and ate in common.

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

  Nonetheless, Daniel is not suggesting rebellion. The promised kingdom will only come about long after the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. Eschatology is deferred. For the present, the Jews in Babylon are quite content in the service of the Gentile king. The political order will be set right in God’s good time. Nebuchadnezzar expresses admiration for Daniel’s god and appoints Daniel ruler over the whole province of Babylon. He does not seem to perceive the threatening character of the prophecy. But then the exaltation of the hero is part of the genre, a stock ending to a tale such as this. We shall see an even more incongruous ending in the story of Belshazzar in chapter 5. Daniel 3 Daniel’s companions, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, play no role in chapter 2, although they are said to be promoted at the end, at Daniel’s request. Conversely, Daniel plays no role in chapter 3. Most probably, these stories were originally independent of each other. The drama of chapter 3 revolves around a demand by King Nebuchadnezzar that all the officials of his kingdom worship a giant statue that he had set up (it is not clear whether the statue represents a god or Nebuchadnezzar himself). Babylonian kings are not otherwise known to have made such demands. The Jews, alone among the king’s officials, are presented with a dilemma, because of the exclusive character of their religion. We do no know of any incidents where Jews were confronted with such a problem before the second century B.C.E. and the persecution initiated by Antiochus Epiphanes of Syria that led to the Maccabean revolt. Since Daniel 7–12 clearly reflects the Maccabean era (168–164 B.C.E.), some scholars have argued that Daniel 3 comes from the same time. But there are notable differences between the two situations. Worship of a statue was not an issue in the Maccabean crisis. (Later, in the first century C.E., the Roman emperor Caligula provoked a crisis by trying to install his statue in the Jerusalem temple.) More importantly, the martyrs of the Maccabean era were not rescued from death: their hope was for vindication after death by resurrection and exaltation. Daniel 3, like the book of Esther, reflects the inherent vulnerability of Jewish life in the Diaspora. The Jews were a people set apart who did not follow the same customs as other people, especially in matters of religion, and therefore were always viewed with suspicion and often with hostility. As in Esther, professional rivalry plays a part in the accusation against the Jews. Unlike Esther, however, the substance of the accusation concerns a religious issue, their refusal to worship an idol.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  without a destination in mind, but in either case it was their dirty feet and slipshod ways that defined them. 31 • • • Jackson was not the only Tennessean to become a national celebrity. Though by the 1830s he would come to be known as a bear hunter and “Lion of the West,” David Crockett was a militia scout and lieutenant, justice of the peace, town commissioner, state representative, and finally a U.S. congressman. He was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1827. What makes the historic David Crockett interesting is that he was self-taught, lived off the land, and (most notably for us) became an ardent defender of squatters’ rights—for he had been a squatter himself. As a politician he took up the cause of the landless poor. 32 Crockett was born in the “state of Franklin,” a state that was not legally a state. It had declared its independence from North Carolina in 1784 and remained unrecognized. Franklin was later incorporated into Tennessee and became a battleground as speculators and squatters scrambled to control the most arable tracts. Their activities triggered an endless series of skirmishes with the Cherokees, exacerbated by blatant treaty violations. The first governor of Tennessee territory, the prodigious land speculator William Blount, was given the Cherokee nickname “Dirt Captain.” From 1797 to 1811, the federal government periodically sent troops into Tennessee to remove squatters, which only increased these ornery men’s natural hostility toward Washington. To Crockett, a man of humble roots willing to stand his ground, was attributed a simple philosophy: “It’s grit of a fellow that makes a man.” But it wasn’t grit alone that counted; an untamed physicality and fecundity was thought to be the most American of attributes. In 1830, in an unprecedented move, Crockett petitioned Congress to grant a resident of his state a tract of public land—not because of hard work, but because his wife had given birth to triplets. 33 As that particular brand of American, the lovable outcast, Crockett acquired a reputation for spinning outrageous tall tales. In a speech he purportedly delivered in Congress (but probably never did give in these exact words) he called himself the “savagest critter you ever did see.” Endowed with superhuman powers, he could “run like a fox, swim like a eel, yell like an Indian,” and “swallow a nigger whole”—an absurd, racist comment that was probably meant to convey his hostility toward great slaveowning planters who pushed poor squatters off their land. The real Crockett owned slaves himself, yet in Congress he opposed large

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  The eighteenth century is also divided. In 1744, the author of the Controverse sur l’âme de la femme (Controversy over Woman’s Soul) declares that “woman created uniquely for man will cease to be at the end of the world because she will cease to be useful for the object for which she had been created, from which follows necessarily that her soul is not immortal.” In a slightly less radical way, Rousseau is the spokesman of the bourgeoisie and dooms woman to her husband and motherhood. “All the education of women should be relative to men … Woman is made to yield to man and to bear his injustices,” he asserts. However, the democratic and individualist ideal of the eighteenth century is favorable to women; for most philosophers they are human beings equal to those of the strong sex. Voltaire denounces the injustice of their lot. Diderot considers their inferiority largely made by society. “Women, I pity thee!” he writes. He thinks that “in all customs the cruelty of civil laws makes common cause with the cruelty of nature against women. They have been treated as idiot beings.” Montesquieu, paradoxically, believes that women should be subordinate to man in the home but that everything predisposes them to political action. “It is against reason and against nature for women to be mistresses in the house … but not for them to govern an empire.” Helvétius shows that woman’s inferiority is created by the absurdity of her education; d’Alembert is of the same opinion. Economic feminism timidly makes its appearance through a woman, Mme de Ciray.* But it is Mercier almost alone in his Tableau de Paris who rises up against the destitution of women workers and tackles the fundamental question of women’s work. Condorcet wants women to enter political life. He considers them man’s equals and defends them against classic attacks: “Women are said … not to have their own feeling of justice, that they listen to their feelings more than to their conscience… [But] it is not nature, it is education, it is the social existence that causes this difference.” And elsewhere: “The more women have been enslaved by laws, the more dangerous their empire has been … It would lessen if women had less interest in keeping it, if it ceased being for them the sole means of defending themselves and escaping oppression.”

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

  In her correspondence and Dialogue we have the biography of Catherine’s soul. Nearly four hundred of her letters are extant.369 Not only have they a place of eminence as the revelations of a saintly woman’s thoughts and inner life, but are, next to the letters written by Petrarch, the chief specimens of epistolary literature of the fourteenth century. She wrote to persons of all classes, to her mother, the recluse in the cloister, her confessor, Raymund of Capua, to men and women addicted to the pleasures of the world, to the magistrates of cities, queens and kings, to cardinals, and to the popes, Gregory XI. and Urban VI., gave words of counsel, set forth at length measures and motives of action, used the terms of entreaty and admonition, and did not hesitate to employ threats of divine judgment, as in writing to the Queen of Naples. They abound in wise counsels. The correspondence shows that Catherine had some acquaintance with the New Testament from which she quotes the greater precepts and draws descriptions from the miracle of the water changed into wine and the expulsion of the moneychangers from the temple and such parables as the ten virgins and the marriage-feast. One of her most frequent expressions is the blood of Christ, and in truly mystical or conventual manner she bids her correspondents, even the pope and the cardinals, bathe and drown and inebriate themselves in it, yea, to clothe and fill themselves with it, "for Christ did not buy us with gold or silver or pearls or other precious stones, but with his own precious blood."370 To Catherine the religious life was a subjection of the will to the will of God and the outgoing of the soul in exercises of prayer and the practice of love. "I want you to wholly destroy your own will that it may cling to Christ crucified." So she wrote to a mother bereft of her children. Writing to the recluse, Bartolomea della Seta, she represented the Saviour as saying, "Sin and virtue consist in the consent of the will, there is no sin or virtue unless voluntarily wrought." To another she wrote, "I have already seen many penitents who have been neither patient nor obedient because they have studied to kill their bodies but not their wills."371

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

  At the opening of the campaign, Julius was in bed with a sickness which was supposed to be mortal; but to the amazement of his court, he suddenly arose and, in the dead of Winter, January, 1511, betook himself to the camp of the papal forces. His promptness of action was in striking contrast to the dilatory policy of Louis, who spent his time writing letters and summoning ecclesiastical assemblies when he ought to have been on the march. From henceforth till his death, the pope wore a beard, as he is represented in Raphael’s famous portrait.833 Snow covered the ground, but Julius set an example by enduring all the hardships of the camp. To accomplish the defeat of the French, he brought about the Holy League, October, 1511, Spain and Venice being the other parties. Later, these three allies were joined by Maximilian and Henry VIII. of England. Henry had been honored with the Golden Rose.834 Henry’s act was England’s first positive entrance upon the field of general European politics. In the meantime the French were carrying on the Council of Pisa. The pope prudently counteracted its influence by calling a council to meet in the Lateran. Christendom was rent by two opposing ecclesiastical councils as well as by two opposing armies. The armies met in decisive conflict under the walls of the old imperial city of Ravenna. The leader of the French, Gaston de Foix, nephew of the French king, though only 24, approved himself, in spite of his youth, one of the foremost captains of his age. Bologna had fallen before his arms, and now Ravenna yielded to the same necessity after a bloody battle. The French army numbered 25,000, the army of the League 20,000. In the French camp was the French legate, Cardinal Sanseverino, mounted and clad in steel armor, his tall form towering above the rest. Prominent on the side of the allied army was the papal legate, Cardinal de’ Medici, clad in white, and Giulio Medici, afterwards Clement VII. The battle took place on Easter Day, 1512. Gaston de Foix, thrown to the ground by the fall of his horse, was put to death by some of the seasoned Spanish soldiers whom Gonsalvo had trained. The victor, whose battle cry was "Let him that loves me follow me," was borne into the city in his coffin. Rimini, Forli and other cities of the Romagna opened their gates to the French. Cardinal Medici was in their hands.

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

  The pope’s spiritual primacy was left untouched. The attack was against his temporal jurisdiction. The fiction of the two swords was set aside. The state is as supreme in its sphere as the Church in its sphere, and derives its authority immediately from God. Constantine had no right to confer the sovereignty of the West upon Sylvester, and his gift constitutes no valid papal claim. Each monarch is supreme in his own realm, and the theory of the overlordship of the emperor is abandoned as a thing out of date. The pope’s tenure of office was made subject to limitation. He may be deposed for heresy and incompetency. Some writers went so far as to deny to him jurisdiction over Church property. The advisory function of the cardinals was emphasized and the independent authority of the bishops affirmed. Above all, the authority residing in the Church as a body of believers was discussed, and its voice, as uttered through a general council, pronounced to be superior to the authority of the pope. The utterances of John of Paris and Peter Dubois on the subject of general councils led straight on to the views propounded during the papal schism at the close of the fourteenth century.83 Dubois demanded that laymen as well as clerics should have a voice in them. The rule of clerical celibacy was attacked, and attention called to its widespread violation in practice. Pope and clergy were invoked to devote themselves to the spiritual well-being of mankind, and to foster peaceable measures for the world’s conversion. This freedom of utterance and changed way of thinking mark the beginning of one of the great revolutions in the history of the Christian Church. To these publicists the modern world owes a debt of gratitude. Principles which are now regarded as axiomatic were new for the Christian public of their day. A generation later, Marsiglius of Padua defined them again with clearness, and took a step still further in advance. § 6. The Transfer of the Papacy to Avignon. The successor of Boniface, Benedict XI., 1303–1304, a Dominican, was a mild-spirited and worthy man, more bent on healing ruptures than on forcing his arbitrary will. Departing from the policy of his predecessor, he capitulated to the state and put an end to the conflict with Philip the Fair. Sentences launched by Boniface were recalled or modified, and the interdict pronounced by that pope upon Lyons was revoked. Palestrina was restored to the Colonna. Only Sciarra Colonna and Nogaret were excepted from the act of immediate clemency and ordered to appear at Rome. Benedict’s death, after a brief reign of eight months, was ascribed to poison secreted in a dish of figs, of which the pope partook freely.84

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

  Which the first wealthy pope received of thee." The Florentine poet’s universal monarchy has remained an ideal unrealized, like the republic of the Athenian philosopher.42 Conception of popular liberty as it is conceived in this modern age, Dante had none. Nevertheless, he laid down the important principle that the government exists for the people, and not the people for the government.43 The treatise De monarchia was burnt as heretical, 1329, by order of John XXII. and put on the Index by the Council of Trent. In recent times it has aided the Italian patriots in their work of unifying Italy and separating politics from the Church according to Cavour’s maxim, "a free Church in a free state." In the front rank of the champions of the temporal power of the papacy stood Aegidius Colonna, called also Aegidius Romanus, 1247–1316.44 He was an Augustinian, and rose to be general of his order. He became famous as a theological teacher and, in 1287, his order placed his writings in all its schools.45 In 1295 he was made archbishop of Bourges, Boniface setting aside in his favor the cleric nominated by Coelestine. Aegidius participated in the council in Rome, 1301, which Philip the Fair forbade the French prelates to attend. He was an elaborate writer, and in 1304 no less than 12 of his theological works and 14 of his philosophical writings were in use in the University of Paris. The tract by which Aegidius is chiefly known is his Power of the Supreme Pontiff—De ecclesiastica sive de summit pontificis potestate. It was the chief work of its time in defence of the papacy, and seems to have been called forth by the Roman Council and to have been written in 1301.46 It was dedicated to Boniface VIII. Its main positions are the following: —