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 Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  FRANK BORMAN Frank Frederick Borman first left Earth at age five, in 1933, when his father took him on a trip from their home in Gary, Indiana, to an airfield in Ohio. There, a barnstorming pilot wedged father and son into the front seat of a Waco biplane and flew them over the countryside. Five-year-old Frank could hardly process the freedom of it all—the open cockpit, the wind in his face, nothing between him and the rest of the world as the machine growled and swooped through an endless sky. The pilot asked for five dollars when the airplane finally settled back on Earth, a fortune during the Great Depression, and the greatest bargain Frank could imagine. Not long after, Frank’s family moved to Tucson, Arizona. His father, Edwin Borman, leased a Mobil service station and tried to make a go of it. The Bormans didn’t have much—just a rented two-bedroom home and a 1929 Dodge with creaky wooden spokes. As the Depression moved into the 1930s, Edwin’s business suffered and he lost his gas station lease. It was then that Frank saw his dad live by the mantra he’d been preaching forever: Do not quit, stay in there and pitch. Edwin took a job changing tires at another garage, then found work driving a laundry truck. Frank’s mother opened their house to boarders to make extra money. At school, Frank’s teachers observed him to be bossy and headstrong, a report that didn’t surprise his parents. Since the day Frank could walk, he had moved in straight lines and with shoulders pinned forward, a kid compelled to arrive. Not everyone knew where Frank was going, not even his mom and dad sometimes, but it seemed to them a mistake to label the boy rude or abrupt just for pushing past people and things that slowed him down. They’d always told Frank he could be the best at whatever he chose if he did things the right way, with excellence and integrity, no shortcuts. Edwin and Frank often sat together at their living room card table

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  his work with America’s space program. He died the next day, of cancer, at age fifty-eight. In one of the last interviews of his life, in 2011, Neil Armstrong called Apollo 8 “an enormously bold decision” that catapulted the American space program forward. Harrison Schmitt, one of the two last people to set foot on the Moon as part of the crew of Apollo 17, said of the flight, “It was probably the most remarkable effort that the NASA team down here ever put together.” When asked to compare Apollo 8 to his historic flight, astronaut Mike Collins said, “I think Apollo 8 was about leaving and Apollo 11 was about arriving, leaving Earth and arriving at the Moon. As you look back one hundred years from now, which is more important? I’m not sure, but I think probably you would say Apollo 8 was of more significance than Apollo 11.” Astronaut Ken Mattingly said, “Of all of the events to participate in, you know, I was lucky because I could do Apollo 11 as well as 8 and then 13. But being part of Apollo 8, it made everything else anticlimactic.” For Chris Kraft, it was simple: “It took more courage to make the decision to do Apollo 8 than anything we ever did in the space program.” — Weeks after the return of Apollo 8, Frank Borman went to work pumping gas at a local Gulf service station in Webster, Texas. He did it for free, along with his two sons, in exchange for use of the station’s garage bay and lift, where the Bormans could work on their cars. The station was owned by a family friend, Toke Kobayashi, a man who also raised world- class tomatoes for sale to restaurants in Chicago. Dressed in grimy jeans and a greasy T-shirt, Borman was almost unrecognizable to customers. One man who pulled in for gas began giving Borman a hard time, and for no good reason. Nearby, Borman’s younger son, fifteen-year-old Ed, knew this was trouble—his father never started a fight but wouldn’t take guff from anyone. Soon the men were near blows. Ed ran over and had to separate them, and it took every bit of his two- hundred-pound frame to do it. Even as Ed moved the belligerents apart, he found himself thinking: This guy has no idea he’s fighting with a man who just got back from the Moon.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  ‘perhaps the greatest religious leader the American Episcopal Church ever produced’.63 Hobart had a dramatic preaching style worthy of the Methodists, and he was the inspiration in founding in New York the General Theological Seminary, the first Anglican equivalent of the Catholic Tridentine seminary. This was a vital springboard for the world mission which the Episcopal Church launched alongside its English counterpart. Yet what was especially significant about Hobart, besides his exceptional practical abilities, was the reasoning behind his vigorous defence of episcopacy. He saw it as the surest foundation for proper continuity with the earliest Christians: those who had struggled for their faith in a hostile empire before Constantine had favoured the Church. This was an example for the Episcopal Church in his own day, its established status gone, coming to terms with its role as a minority in the new republic. For Hobart, his Episcopal Church had a very different destiny from that of the United Church of England and Ireland as by Law Established.64 What the Americans first experienced and both the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland then had to face up to was the discovery that a Church needs to make decisions for itself, whether or not it clings in some form to establishment – something obvious to European Protestant Radicals and English Dissenters from their earliest sixteenth-century stirrings. In that respect, the Oxford Movement could integrate successfully in an initially hostile Church, because it offered a positive answer to a problem more widely felt. With its insistence on the continuity in succession of bishops right back to the Apostles, and the role of the bishop as guardian of the sacraments, it provided a coherent view of what a bishop was and what he should do (although High Churchpeople’s view of episcopacy tended to become more nuanced if a bishop forbade them to do what they wanted). Even those who were not High Churchpeople approved of the Church gradually gaining a forum for its own debate, first in the revival of the Convocations of Canterbury and York in 1852 and 1861, and then in the creation of a series of Church assemblies which paid steadily more attention to the opinions of laypeople. It was also clear that the High Church commitment to liturgy and episcopal government gave coherence to the worldwide and hitherto unlabelled Church which was emerging from British imperial conquest and American Revolution. In fact it was in New Zealand, under the guidance of a notable High Churchman who later returned to an English diocese, Bishop George Selwyn, that the first Anglican experiments in lay participation in Church government took place, furnishing precedents to the Church of England.65 The term which Tractarians had revived for their own party purposes, ‘Anglicanism’, was now conveniently appropriated to describe a new beast with a reach across the globe: ‘the Anglican

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  public relations stunt arranged by NASA, but he changed his mind after hearing the passion in Lindbergh’s questions about Apollo 8. After a few minutes, the four men—and Anne, also a pilot—were immersed in conversation about flying. Not one of the astronauts resented the imposition on his time. By now, there wasn’t any sense in cramming more pages from a flight manual or checklist; with twenty hours to go until launch, you either knew your stuff or you didn’t. The conversation turned to spacewalking, and how it compared to the old barnstorming stunt of wing-walking. The Lindberghs were interested to hear that one’s sensation of altitude decreased as one flew higher, until it hardly seemed to register in space (where the familiar scenery that helped people judge distance from the ground all but disappeared), and to learn that in space there was no up or down. The astronauts were equally interested to learn of a conversation Lindbergh once had in the 1930s with Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocket engineering. It was theoretically possible, Goddard had told Lindbergh, to design a rocket powerful enough to reach the Moon, but the money required to build it—as much as a million dollars—would likely keep such a wonder in the realm of science fiction. The astronauts had a good laugh at that one. Lindbergh performed a back-of-napkin calculation after learning how much fuel the Saturn V required to send Apollo 8 to the Moon. “In the first second of your flight,” Lindbergh said, “you’ll burn more than ten times as much as I did flying the Spirit of St. Louis all the way from New York to Paris.” — Later that day, Anders’s childhood priest arrived at crew quarters. Father Dennis Barry had come to give Anders—a devout Catholic since childhood—communion. This visit annoyed Borman, who was growing edgier as the hours to launch counted down. The longer Father Barry stayed, the more irritated Borman grew. Finally, Borman snapped. “Are you gonna take communion every thirty seconds before the flight?” Borman asked. “No, Frank. He’s just visiting,” Anders said.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Texas-sized Who the hell does he think he is? For the crew of Apollo 8, there was a silver lining—a last, unexpected chance to kiss their wives goodbye. — As the astronauts flew to the White House, the family of one of the thirty thousand Americans killed so far during the fighting in Vietnam prepared for their own visit to the nation’s capital. On October 31, 1967, just a month before he was to return home, Captain Riley L. Pitts of the U.S. Army led his company on an assault of a Vietcong position in the dense jungle of Ap Dong, South Vietnam. After enduring withering fire, Pitts threw his body on top of an enemy hand grenade and waited to die. When the grenade failed to explode, Pitts moved his company forward, putting himself in the direct line of enemy fire until he was cut down in a hailstorm of bullets. As the crew of Apollo 8 arrived with their wives at the White House, Capt. Pitts’s widow, Eula, laid out a dark suit and a bow tie for her five- year-old son, Mark, and a fine white blouse for her seven-year-old daughter, Stacie, at their home in Oklahoma City. The next day, the president would make her husband the first African American officer ever to receive the nation’s highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor. Millions of Americans considered astronauts to be the epitome of American courage. To Borman, Lovell, and Anders, that label better belonged to men like Pitts. Joining the crew of Apollo 8 and their wives at the black tie gala were twenty other astronauts, Chris Kraft and Wernher von Braun, and former NASA chief James Webb, who was to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom later in the evening. Also present was Charles Lindbergh, who’d stunned the world when he flew nonstop from New York to Paris in 1927. To many at NASA, despite his controversial political views, Lindbergh was a pinnacle aviation hero, a man who had taken to the skies to do the impossible. Before dinner, a small concert was staged in the East Room. When Valerie Anders took her place in the audience, she was dismayed to hear dozens of people coughing and sneezing. This is so stupid, she thought.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  given up flying for health reasons.) And it was moving to hear, through my headset, the admiration paid to Borman by a young flight controller in Montana, who seemed in awe that he was giving clearance to the first man who’d ever reached the Moon. On my behalf, Borman called Chris Kraft, one of the titans of NASA, and a man as responsible as anyone for the success of the American space program. A few weeks later, I was in Houston meeting with Kraft, already in his nineties and possessing enough energy to go back and run Mission Control (which he invented). Kraft gave me two full days of interviews, and helped me reach other NASA veterans who lived in and around Houston. My week there was immensely rewarding in the company of these pioneers. On my last day in Houston, I took my thirteen-year-old son to the Johnson Space Center to see the Saturn V rocket, still the most powerful machine ever built. Everyone I’d spoken to, from astronauts to NASA personnel to technical experts, warned that the immensity of the Saturn V couldn’t quite be described, that one had to be in its presence to believe it. We paid our admission, admired the Space Shuttle, took turns in a simulator that twisted and shook. Then, we found the rocket. It was laid on its side, 363 feet long end-to-end, bursting out of its own building. A decade-and-a-half into the twenty-first century, it’s near impossible to find a piece of technology from the past that can impress a thirteen-year-old who owns an iPhone, an Xbox, and a quad-core computer. My son stood beside the five F-1 engines at the base of the rocket. He didn’t look at his phone or check his texts. He didn’t take a picture. He just kept staring at the nozzles of these engines, each more than twelve feet tall, and after staying still for several minutes, he asked if we could stay some more. I made one more trip to Montana after that, to see Borman. After several days, we wrapped up by going to dinner at one of his favorite barbeque restaurants. We’d been seated only a few minutes when a bartender rushed up to him holding a newspaper. “Frank, the paper says you’re one of Montana’s most famous residents!” she said. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. It wasn’t clear she had any idea who Borman was or why he was famous, but he smiled and said “Thank you very much” all the same.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  in the universe, though he did so without public drama.101 ‘I never gave up Christianity till I was forty years of age … It is not supported by evidence,’ he responded to uncourteously persistent questioning a few months before his death in 1882. Still he was given a funeral in Westminster Abbey, with a grave near that unconventional Christian, Sir Isaac Newton, and with two dukes and an earl among those bearing his coffin.102 An article in The Times of London in 1864 had spoken of the conflict between science and religion, and the idea of this conflict became one of the clichés of Western public discourse. Marx clearly believed in it, for in admiration he sent Darwin a signed copy of Das Kapital (it remained uncut in Darwin’s library).103 Many, like Darwin, identified themselves as not prepared definitely to pronounce on matters of divinity. They called themselves ‘agnostics’, yet another of those newly minted words which were signs of nineteenth-century struggles to describe phenomena with no precedent, in this case a coinage of 1869 from Darwin’s extrovert and aggressive friend Thomas Huxley. A few were driven by nineteenth-century seriousness to reject God in an almost religious fashion, giving that ancient insult ‘atheist’ a new resonance, and borrowing the word ‘humanist’ from its previous incarnation as an attitude to a branch of learning. They founded atheist or humanist associations with the sort of improving activism which one might expect from contemporary Protestant Free Churches: Sunday Schools, lectures, social activities, even hymn books. Perhaps their beliefs were the ultimate form of Protestant dissent. Some who felt that science had won the struggle with Christianity were driven to explore the great religions of eastern Asia. A curious construct of religious belief newly named ‘Theosophy’ (from its emphasis on the search for divine wisdom) gained an enthusiastic anglophone middle-class following during the 1890s; it was one of the earliest expressions of that major component of modern Western religion, ‘New Age’ spirituality. One of the most dramatic of the many dramatic conversion experiences of the nineteenth century was that of the former Anglican country parson’s wife Mrs Annie Besant, who after years as president of the National Secular Society, horrified her fellow secularists by her transfer in 1889 to Theosophy. Soon she was once more exercising her lifelong gift for leadership by presidency of the Theosophical Society, sharing her new ministry with an even more exotic exponent of the New Age, Madame Blavatsky.104 It is no coincidence that several eminent late-nineteenth-century researchers in physics and chemistry were affected by the allied craze for spiritualism. This was a movement imported from the United States, which seemed able to restore the connection between the material and the spiritual in ‘seances’ which closely resembled the method of the scientific experiment. Darwin despised spiritualism,

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  professor Carl Sagan invited Borman and Susan to his home for a roundtable with students. The Bormans accepted, then were treated to an evening of attacks on America and its conduct in Vietnam, all of it encouraged by Sagan, whom Borman would never forgive for the treatment. After Apollo 9 and Apollo 10 flew successful missions in March and May 1969, Borman and his family boarded a plane for another goodwill trip, this one to Russia. The Soviet ambassador to Washington had extended the invitation, and President Nixon thought it a positive step toward easing tensions between the two nations. With the president’s permission, Borman and Susan brought their sons. As the first astronaut ever to visit Russia, Borman was given first-class treatment and shown some of the Soviet Union’s proudest sites. He was given a tour of the highly secret “Star City” near Moscow, where cosmonauts lived and trained; laid wreaths at the resting places of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin; sampled wines in Yalta; and met with a top Soviet physicist. One night, he and his family were honored at a crowded dinner at the regal restaurant in Moscow’s famed Metropole Hotel. One of the cosmonauts in attendance, Alexei Leonov, was struck by a piece of Borman’s attire—in place of a traditional necktie, he wore a bolo tie set with a bright blue stone. “Everyone wanted to stand near to him,” Leonov would later write of the evening. “To touch him.” Borman congratulated Leonov on his 1965 spacewalk and described how the Moon had appeared close up, then showed slides of his lunar journey to a rapt audience. Although Borman had considered the Soviet Union an enemy, he liked the Russian people and held the cosmonauts in the highest regard—no westerner better understood the rigors of their training, or the great risks they took for their country. Susan took a ring from her finger and gave it to a cosmonaut, a gift from her family to theirs. By trip’s end, Borman saw the cosmonauts as he saw the astronauts—a group of test and fighter pilots, all of whom wanted more than anything else to help their country succeed. And he admired their candor—to a man, they seemed generous in acknowledging that America had won the race to the Moon. —

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  his own blood as ink, Anders scrawled out directions to the crew on a chart, and the fight continued. Eighty minutes after the attack started, desperate men made their way to small escape craft. Anders was last off the boat and then lost consciousness. By the end, two Americans and an Italian journalist from the Panay had died, dozens had been wounded, and the sinking became an international incident. Realizing that it had committed an act of war against the United States, Japan apologized. Arthur Anders received the Navy Cross, the highest honor bestowed by that branch for a peacetime action. The orders he wrote in blood are preserved in the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington. The prelude to the fight would remain one of young Bill’s earliest memories. — Bill’s parents, both Americans, had met in the Philippines during Arthur’s tour of duty there. Muriel’s father was the civilian in charge of the Cavite Navy Yard, which repaired American ships. Bill, the couple’s only child, was born in Hong Kong. The family moved often when Bill was young, eventually returning to America in 1938. Through his childhood, Bill absorbed the Navy life, and he expected to attend the Naval Academy, as his father had. When he was fourteen, Bill moved with his family to Weimar, Texas. As Arthur drove Bill to school one day, father and son spotted a biplane in a field, along with a banner hanging from a fence: AIRPLANE RIDES—FIVE DOLLARS. A few minutes later, Bill and the pilot were soaring over open fields. “Want to do a loop?” the man asked. Bill nodded. The pilot was low for that kind of maneuver, no higher than two thousand feet, but he pulled up, looped over, and managed to just miss the ground as he righted the plane. Bill had a hard time concentrating in school that day; no matter how hard he tried to focus, his mind kept looping over Texas. Driving home that afternoon, Bill and his father came upon the field where Bill had flown. The plane was still there, but this time it was

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  He was briefly surprised at how easily he used his title to refer to her, and then hastily shoved the thought away. “Aye, Captain.” Will’s laughter followed him below deck. Sebastian rapped on his cabin door. “My lady? ’Tis I. I’m coming in.” He entered cautiously, peeking his head around the door and searching out her shapely form. He found Olivia sitting at his desk, drowning in his shirt, leveling a pistol at his chest. The mere sight of her made him ache. Golden and determined, she was a tigress. “Do you know what you’re doing with that?” he asked. “Yes, of course.” He kicked the door shut behind him and headed toward the sideboard for a much-needed libation. Her gaze burned into his back, causing him to smile. “Care for a brandy, sweet wife?” “Is there any proof you are my husband?” she asked curtly. “Is there any proof you’re my wife?” he retorted, pouring her a glass of the deep red liquid with the hope that it would soothe her ill humor. “The ring . . .” Sebastian held his hand over his shoulder and waggled his ringed finger at her. She snorted. “Who taught you the use of a pistol?” he queried as he warmed the liquor over a candle. “The foreman on my father’s plantation.” When he turned to face her, he found his gun resting on the desk and Olivia staring pensively out the window. “Your father approved?” “My father doesn’t know. I wanted to learn. There was no cause to distress him.” Withholding a smile, Sebastian moved toward her, admiring her elegant profile, with its pert nose and obstinate chin. Her bottom lip was caught between her teeth, and the thought of claiming that lush mouth with various parts of his body nearly made him hard. He set her brandy atop his nautical charts and propped his hip against the desk. “What are you thinking, love?” he prodded gently. She reached for the snifter without looking, and he pushed it into her hand. “That you should put on a shirt.” “I’m quite comfortable, but I’m touched by your wifely concern.” In the midst of a large swallow, Olivia choked. He thumped her back until she waved him off. “I’m fine!” she gasped. Wiping the tears from her lashes, she glared at him. “What are your intentions, Phoenix?” Sebastian reached over slowly, giving her time to draw away. She didn’t. The pulse at the base of her throat fluttered wildly as he rubbed the cuff of his shirt, brushing the edge of his finger deliberately along her bared wrist. He felt her shiver and hid his satisfaction. The attraction, it appeared, was mutual.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  spearheaded by British Evangelicals who made it a point of principle to uphold biblical certainties. Many of their fellow Evangelicals berated them for their inconsistency and few of their allies in mainland European Protestantism showed much sympathy for their project. It is true that other moral dimensions nuance Lecky’s judgement. The ethical imperative in the circle of Sharp and Wilberforce was part of a new self- confidence and imperial assertiveness on the part of Britain, taking shape even as its North American empire was ripped in two. A direct outcome of the abolitionist movement was one of the earliest British colonies to extend the Crown’s territorial ambitions beyond coastal trading forts outside America and India: Sierra Leone in West Africa. Inaugurated in 1792 after a badly conceived false start in the same area five years before, this was a cooperation between the indefatigable Evangelical abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, his ex-naval officer brother John and a West African – an Egba prince who in enslavement had taken the name Thomas Peters and then regained his freedom by fighting for the British in the American War of Independence. The venture tried to learn lessons from a second previous failed colony of 1775 on the ominously (though coincidentally) named Mosquito Coast of Central America. That had been a partnership between an English businessman and another formerly enslaved African-American, Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography had become a transatlantic best-seller, especially among Evangelicals, and who became one of the advisers to the new Sierra Leone scheme. The Mosquito Coast venture involved using enslaved Africans to make it commercially viable, with only a vague prospect that financial success would bring them freedom: that strategy was very far from abolitionism and the slaves sought to escape, all drowning in the attempt.19 There was now no question but that the Sierra Leone colonists who started arriving in 1792 should be Africans to whom freedom had been restored, either liberated on the West African coast or shipped back from the Americas complete with Protestant Christian values. Thomas Peters had his own ideas as to what those values might be, and he had the temerity to demand more political rights for his black fellow settlers than Englishmen would have enjoyed back home. Against him were ranged the English directors of the Sierra Leone Company, who as in the Mosquito Coast venture linked ‘the true principles of Commerce’ to ‘the introduction of Christianity and Civilization’, and who crushed uprisings by kindred spirits to Peters after his early death.20 Yet Peters’s fellow colonists who shared his spirit of independence and self-reliance had the advantage that the tropical climate made even shorter work of British administrators than it did of returned African-Americans. The new venture soon developed a hierarchical

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  133 Plato’s contribution, in addition to his writings, was to create in Athens a university where lectures were held and young people were trained. Through this university, the ideas of Socrates were institutionalized. Alfred North Whitehead said, “All philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato.” The greatest of Plato’s works is the Republic. Like The Divine Comedy , Plato’s Republic is a dif fi cult book to read. Like The Divine Comedy , it summarizes the values of a civilization at its apex. That civilization is the world of the polis, the city-state of classical Greece. Plato’s Republic is concerned with how to create a constitution that ensures justice for all citizens. Plato puts this discussion into the form of dialogues. When the Republic begins, Socrates is returning from a religious festival in honor of the goddess Artemis. He stops to visit his friend Cephalus, who wonders about the afterlife, whether he has an immortal soul, what will happen to his soul, and whether good and bad behavior will have consequences. The two then begin to discuss justice. The discussion starts with the conventional de fi nition of justice, that is, rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Socrates, in the dialogues of Plato, often begins with a statement that everyone can accept. Socrates then asks how a just man can do unjust things, even to his enemies. Socrates shows that the original de fi nition is wrong. No good man would do harm to another. One of the participants in the dialogue is Thrasymachus, a Sophist. The true Sophist in Athens educated their students to argue either side of an issue. To argue either side of a case successfully, an individual must be believe that the position is true. Therefore, the Sophist does not believe in absolute values. For the Sophist, unlike for Socrates, truth is whatever is expedient at the moment. Thrasymachus argues that justice is power. Justice is what the powerful can get away with, and laws are what the powerful put in place to serve their own interests; thus, no such quality as justice can exist. This idea was accepted in Athens. Athenian foreign policy during the war with Sparta rested on the belief that might makes right. For example, in 416 B.C., Athens had demanded that the neutral nation of Melos join the Athenian coalition. When Alfred North Whitehead said, “All philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato.”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  tance of an opponent can be used to make him fall. If people resist you be- She'll be glad \ To know cause they don't trust you, an apparently selfless deed, showing how far you you 're risking your neck, are willing to go to prove yourself, is a powerful remedy. If they resist be- and for her sake: that will offer \ Any mistress sure cause they are virtuous, or because they are loyal to someone else, all the proof of your love. better—virtue and repressed desire are easily overcome by action. As the — O V I D , T H E A R T O F L O V E , great seductress Natalie Barney once wrote, "Most virtue is a demand for TRANSLATED BY PETER GREEN greater seduction." There are two ways to prove yourself. First, the spontaneous action: a situation arises in which the target needs help, a problem needs solving, or, The man says: " . . . A simply, he or she needs a favor. You cannot foresee these situations, but you fruit picked from one's own must be ready for them, for they can spring up at any time. Impress the tar- orchard ought to taste sweeter than one obtained get by going further than really necessary—sacrificing more money, more from a stranger's tree, and time, more effort than they had expected. Your target will often use these what has been attained by 323 324 • The Art of Seduction greater effort is cherished moments, or even manufacture them, as a kind of test: will you retreat? Or more dearly than what is will you rise to the occasion? You cannot hesitate or flinch, even for a mo-gained with little trouble. As the proverb says: ment, or all is lost. If necessary, make the deed seem to have cost you more 'Prizes great cannot be than it has, never with words, but indirectly—exhausted looks, reports won unless some heavy spread through a third party, whatever it takes. labor's done.'" • The The second way to prove yourself is the brave deed that you plan and woman says: "If no great prizes can be won unless execute in advance, on your own and at the right moment—preferably some heavy labor's done, some way into the seduction, when any doubts the victim still has about you must suffer the you are more dangerous than earlier on. Choose a dramatic, difficult action exhaustion of many toils to be able to attain the favors that reveals the painful time and effort involved. Danger can be extremely you seek, since what you seductive. Cleverly lead your victim into a crisis, a moment of danger, or ask for is a greater prize." indirectly put them in an uncomfortable position, and you can play the res- • The man says: "I give you all the thanks that I cuer, the gallant knight. The powerful feelings and emotions this elicits can can express for so sagely

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  She was either mad from the stress of the day’s events or . . . enchanting. Sebastian became engrossed in the intimacy of their shared amusement, the rest of their problems fading into obscurity. His hand came up and drew a line down the bridge of her pert nose, which she wrinkled when he tapped the tip. Olivia stared at him with admiration in her dark eyes, a look that salved the sting his ego had felt mere moments ago. “A savage with a delightful dimple,” she murmured under her breath, brushing her fingertip along his cheek. “Why are you out here?” she asked almost breathlessly. “You, a nobleman of vast wealth and prestige. Why turn to piracy?” “Ah . . .” He ached to pull her closer. His throat tight, his hand dropped to her shoulder. “You believe me.” She snorted again, a thoroughly unladylike sound that he found charming. “I’m just foxed is all, and willing to indulge you for the moment.” “My lady, you should pay greater attention to your choice of wording. You have no notion of the indulgences I require.” At her confused frown, Sebastian clarified, “I am no gentleman.” “You are an earl, my lord.” “It’s a title, Lady Merrick, and it has nothing to do with my character.” “You have been trained and bred for your—” “I have been cursed,” he said hotly. “My older brother, Edmund, was to bear the title, but he was killed in a duel five years ago.” “A duel?” she repeated, her eyes widening. “How dreadful! I am sorry.” “Yes, well . . . so am I, I assure you. Especially since he was defending my honor.” He gave a harsh laugh. “As if I had any to quibble over.” “He must have loved you very much.” “Edmund loved the title,” Sebastian scoffed. Olivia met his intense gaze without flinching. “What happened?” He longed to make some flip, roguish, or snide comment to deflect her prying. He wanted to sneer at her and cut her, scare her, and push her away. But his next words would do the deed just as well. “I foolishly compromised a young lady. When her older brother came to me and demanded that I marry the chit, I refused. She was no innocent, as I knew firsthand. And the way we were caught left no doubt in my mind that I’d been snared in a trap.”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The Renaissance courtesan Tullia d'Aragona, developing friendships with the 'Dearest of all my great thinkers and poets of her time, talked of literature and philosophy— companions," he said, anything but the boudoir (and anything but the money that was also her "where have you been goal). Johannes, the narrator of Søren Kierkegaard's The Seducer's Diary, fol-hunting? On what mountain ridges?" She lows his target, Cordelia, from a distance; when their paths cross, he is po-raised herself from the lite and apparently shy. As Cordelia gets to know him, he doesn't frighten grass: "Greeting, divine her. In fact he is so innocuous she begins to wish he were less so. mistress," she cried, "greater in my sight than Duke Ellington, the great jazz artist and a consummate seducer, would Create a False Sense of Security— Approach Indirectly • 183 initially dazzle the ladies with his good looks, stylish clothing, and cha- Jove himself— I care not risma. But once he was alone with a woman, he would take a slight step if he hears me!" Jove laughed to hear her words. back, becoming excessively polite, making only small talk. Banal conversa- Delighted to be preferred to tion can be a brilliant tactic; it hypnotizes the target. The dullness of your himself, he kissed her— not front gives the subtlest suggestive word, the slightest look, an amplified with the restraint becoming power. Never mention love and you make its absence speak volumes—your to a maiden's kisses: and as she began to tell of her victims will wonder why you never discuss your emotions, and as they have hunting exploits in the such thoughts, they will go further, imagining what else is going on in your forest, he prevented her by mind. They will be the ones to bring up the topic of love or affection. De- his embrace, and betrayed his real self by a shameful liberate dullness has many applications. In psychotherapy, the doctor makes action. So far from monosyllabic responses to draw patients in, making them relax and open complying, she resisted up. In international negotiations, Henry Kissinger would lull diplomats him as far as a woman could . . . but how could a with boring details, then strike with bold demands. Early in a seduction, girl overcome a man, and less-colorful words are often more effective than vivid ones—the target who could defeat Jupiter? tunes them out, looks at your face, begins to imagine, fantasize, fall under He had his way, and returned to the upper air. your spell. Getting to your targets through other people is extremely effective; in- — O V I D , METAMORPHOSES, TRANSLATED BY MARY M. INNES

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  Hugh La Coeur liked kissing. He took his time with it, tasting her, caressing the inside of her mouth with deep licks of his talented tongue. She’d had her share of selfish bed partners, men who couldn’t be bothered with foreplay. Hugh, however, was a tactile man. He loved to caress her hair, her skin, her lips, and she preened like a cat under his touch, wanting to stretch and purr and soak up his affection. Fierce and primitive in bed, he took her body as if it belonged to him, as if it existed only for his pleasure. The tiny glimpses of vulnerability she’d seen in him certainly didn’t extend to the bedroom. His lovemaking was breathtaking, his stamina impressive. Twice she’d begged him to leave her alone, only to find that she craved him again within moments. He knew it, too, the arrogant man. It was rather like an addiction to chocolate, she supposed. She only hoped she would have her fill before the storm blew over and he went away. Charlotte picked up her brush and ran it through her hair. “I told him about the map and Glenmoore.” “That sounds promising. What did he say?” “He offered to help, actually.” She thought of his reactions to everything he’d witnessed so far and had to admire his aplomb. Nothing seemed to catch him off guard. And the way he’d soothed Katie and offered to buy a dozen pitchers for her . . . Charlotte had been touched. She didn’t trust people easily, but Hugh’s flashes of kindness for her, for his footman, and for her servants made her believe he was someone who genuinely cared for her welfare. “Do you think he can? Help, that is?” She shrugged. “I’m not certain, but I don’t see how it can hurt anything for him to try, and it will keep us occupied during the storm.” Laughter greeted that statement. “I didn’t think you needed any outside influences to keep you two occupied.” Charlotte set the brush down with a firm click. “Now that, I’m certain, isn’t proper at all!” Chapter Five Hugh stared into Artemis’s single eye and refused to give ground. To cave in to a servant . . . Why, the thought was abominable! “Listen, old chap,” he said curtly. “’Tis a simple enough question.” Artemis set his hands on his hips. “And one ye need be askin’ ’er Grace!” “You answer the door, for Christ’s sake! You know as well as anyone if Lord Glenmoore comes calling here.” “O’ course I know! Doesn’t mean I’ll be tellin’ you!” The bulbous eye protruded further as the butler narrowed his gaze. “You can ask from ’ere to perdition, gov’na, and I—” “Hang it all!! The proper address for a peer is ‘my lord.’ Is that so bloody difficult?” Artemis gasped. “’Ere now! Are ye complainin’ ’bout the way I perform my duties?” “Complaining?” Hugh snorted. “Good God, I’m astounded. Amazed. Stunned.”

• From Story of the Eye (1928)

  For either of these books to be an amateur’s one-shot seems scarcely conceivable. Different as they are from each other, Story of O and The Image both evince a quality that can’t be ascribed simply to an abundance of the usual writerly endowments of sensibility, energy, and intelligence. Such gifts, very much in evidence, have themselves been processed through a dialogue of artifices. The somber self-consciousness of the narratives could hardly be further from the lack of control and craft usually considered the expression of obsessive lust. Intoxicating as is their subject (if the reader doesn’t cut off and find it just funny or sinister), both narratives are more concerned with the “use” of erotic material than with the “expression” of it. And this use is preeminently—there is no other word for it—literary. The imagination pursuing its outrageous pleasures in Story of O and The Image remains firmly anchored to certain notions of the formal consummation of intense feeling, of procedures for exhausting an experience, that connect as much with literature and recent literary history as with the ahistorical domain of eros. And why not? Experiences aren’t pornographic; only images and representations—structures of the imagination—are. That is why a pornographic book can make the reader think of, mainly, other pornographic books, rather than sex unmediated—and this not necessarily to the detriment of his erotic excitement. For instance, what resonates throughout Story of O is a voluminous body of pornographic or “libertine” literature, mostly trash, in both French and English, going back to the eighteenth century. The most obvious reference is to Sade. But here one must not think only of the writings of Sade himself, but of the reinterpretation of Sade by French literary intellectuals after World War II, a critical gesture perhaps comparable in its importance and influence upon educated literary taste and upon the actual direction of serious fiction in France to the reappraisal of James launched just before World War II in the United States, except that the French reappraisal has lasted longer and seems to have struck deeper roots. (Sade, of course, had never been forgotten. He was read enthusiastically by Flaubert, Baudelaire, and most of the other radical geniuses of French literature of the late nineteenth century. He was one of the patron saints of the Surrealist movement, and figures importantly in the thought of Breton.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  Should you get lucky with cousin or inflict rare social disease this office will deny all knowledge of your actions. The presumption of Allagash appalls you. When you call his office to decline the invitation, he has already left. Well, it’s his cousin and his problem. The thought of the Allagash genes and the Boston climate is a frightening one. His brief description suggests a prig, a wearer of plaid tartan skirts, a former contender on the green New England hockey fields and a noncontender in the Looks Department. Born into the manner that Clara has been faking ever since she went to Vassar. You will unplug the phone and say you never got the letter. You switch on the tube and throw yourself on the couch. Much fun on Family Feud . Ten grand rides on a question about garden tools; Richard Dawson flexes his eyebrows. But you keep glancing at the clock. By seven-twenty you are on your feet, pacing between the two rooms, kicking your laundry into the corners. If you know Tad, he won’t even make it to the Lion’s Head and the poor girl will be left to the slender mercies of all those aspiring actors and failed writers. A few friendly drinks with her wouldn’t kill you. You throw on a jacket and head out. You arrive ten minutes late. It’s two deep along the bar and no sign of Allagash. No sign of anybody wearing a plaid tartan skirt and Allagash features. In the middle of your beer you spot a woman standing alone beside the coatrack, holding a drink and reading a paperback. She looks up from time to time and then returns to her reading. You watch her eyes as they move around the room. Her face is intelligent. The hair is somewhere between strawberry and gold, you can’t tell in this light. That she could be the Boston Allagash is too much to hope. Boots, jeans and a black silk shirt. Not a patch of madras or tartan on her. The hell with Allagash and his race. You would like to speak to this woman, ask her if she’s eaten dinner. Perhaps she is the one who could make you forget your cares and woes, start eating breakfast, take up jogging. You edge in closer. The book in her hand is Spinoza’s Ethics . No flies on that. She looks up again and you catch her eye. “We don’t get many Rationalists in here,” you say. “I’m not surprised,” she says. “Too dark.” Her voice is like gravel spread with honey. She holds a smile just long enough to encourage you and then returns to her book. You wish you could remember something about Spinoza, besides the fact that he was excommunicated. Allagash appears in the door. You consider hiding out in the Men’s Room, but he spots you and comes over. Tad shakes your hand. Then he plants a kiss on the philosopher’s cheek.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  The place was really one long room, with a full-size bed in the front, a kitchenette, and a living area in the back with a TV and a small bathroom—so small that in order to take a shower, you pretty much had to sit on the toilet. “It ain’t much,” the Colonel’s mom (“That’s Dolores, not Miss Martin”) told us. “But y’alls a-gonna have a turkey the size o’ the kitchen.” She laughed. The Colonel ushered us out of the trailer immediately after our brief tour, and we walked through the neighborhood, a series of trailers and mobile homes on dirt roads. “Well, now you get why I hate rich people.” And I did. I couldn’t fathom how the Colonel grew up in such a small place. The entire trailer was smaller than our dorm room. I didn’t know what to say to him, how to make him feel less embarrassed. “I’m sorry if it makes you uncomfortable,” he said. “I know it’s probably foreign.” “Not to me,” Alaska piped up. “Well, you don’t live in a trailer,” he told her. “Poor is poor.” “I suppose,” the Colonel said. — Alaska decided to go help Dolores with dinner. She said that it was sexist to leave the cooking to the women, but better to have good sexist food than crappy boy-prepared food. So the Colonel and I sat on the pull-out couch in the living room, playing video games and talking about school. “I finished my religion paper. But I have to type it up on your computer when we get back. I think I’m ready for finals, which is good, since we have an ank-pray to an-play.” “Your mom doesn’t know pig Latin?” I smirked. “Not if I talk fast. Christ, be quiet.” The food—fried okra, steamed corn on the cob, and pot roast that was so tender it fell right off the plastic fork—convinced me that Dolores was an even better cook than Maureen. Culver Creek’s okra had less grease, more crunch. Dolores was also the funniest mom I’d ever met. When Alaska asked her what she did for work, she smiled and said, “I’m a culnary engineeyer. That’s a short- order cook at the Waffle House to y’all.” “Best Waffle House in Alabama.” The Colonel smiled, and then I realized, he wasn’t embarrassed of his mom at all. He was just scared that we would act like condescending boarding-school snobs. I’d always found the Colonel’s I- hate-the-rich routine a little overwrought until I saw him with his mom. He was the same Colonel, but in a totally different context. It made me hope that one day, I could meet Alaska’s family, too. — Dolores insisted that Alaska and I share the bed, and she slept on the pull-out while the Colonel was out in his tent. I worried he would get cold, but frankly I wasn’t about to give up my bed with Alaska.

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  81 Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice Lecture 15 We love deception. We love power. We love to manipulate others, and in turn are ourselves manipulated. That is the tragedy in Shakespeare— human nature, again and again committing the same mistakes and refusing to learn. T he Divine Comedy is a work of profound philosophical and religious meaning. It is a commedia because life is ultimately a comedy in that it can end in salvation and eternal bliss. The goal of The Divine Comedy is to lead the reader to the wisdom that recognizes the love of God, which moves the entire universe and, at the same time, can care for each person as an individual. Dante is a member of a select company of authors. Of the Greeks, Homer was the outstanding genius against whose works all others are measured. Vergil was the outstanding genius for the Romans. Dante chose Vergil as a guide because of the grandeur of his poetry. Goethe is the outstanding genius for the Germans. In the English-speaking world, William Shakespeare is our Dante, our Goethe, our Homer, and our Vergil. Shakespeare was a master of tragedy, a master of comedy, and a master of historical plays. Shakespeare lived in an age of religious fervor and grandeur in England. Queen Elizabeth I was the ruler of Renaissance England, which was expanding across the world and beginning to establish settlements in the New World. This age was an era of heroic events, for example, the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. It was a time of great leaders throughout the known world, including Queen Elizabeth I, Ivan the Terrible, and Sulayman the Magnifi cent of the Ottoman Empire. But this was also an era was of religious intolerance; it was an age of great wars of religion. Shakespeare’s plays do not refl ect the religious fervor of the era. In Shakespeare, the human element is paramount. The defi nitive cultural feature of the Athenian democracy had been Greek tragedy. In the Elizabethan age, the de fi nitive cultural statement is found in the plays of Shakespearecomedies, tragedies, and histories.