Awe

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 Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  A Multitude from the Tribulation 9 After these things I looked, and this is what I saw: a vast multitude which no one could count, [gathered] from every nation and from all the tribes and peoples and languages [of the earth], standing before the throne and before the Lamb (Christ), dressed in white robes, with d palm branches in their hands; 10 and in a loud voice they cried out, saying, “S alvation [belongs] to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb [our salvation is the Trinity’s to give, and to God the Trinity we owe our deliverance].” 11 And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the [twenty-four] elders and the four living creatures; and they fell to their faces before the throne and worshiped God, 12 saying, “A men! Blessing and glory and majesty and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might belong to our God forever and ever. Amen.” 13 Then one of the elders responded, saying to me, “These who are dressed in the long white robes—who are they, and from where did they come?” 14 I said to him, “My lord, you know [the answer].” And he said to me, “These are the people who come out of the great tribulation (persecution), and they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb [because of His atoning sacrifice]. [Gen 49:11 ; Dan 12:1 ] 15 “For this reason, they are [standing] before the throne of God; and they serve Him [in worship] day and night in His temple; and He who sits on the throne will e spread His tabernacle over them and shelter and protect them [with His presence]. [Rev 21:3 ] 16 “They will hunger no longer, nor thirst anymore; nor will the sun f beat down on them, nor any [scorching] heat; [Is 49:10 ; Ps 121:6 ] 17 for the Lamb who is in the center of the throne will be their Shepherd, and He will guide them to springs of the waters of life; and God will wipe every tear from their eyes [giving them eternal comfort].” [Ps 23:2 ; Is 25:8 ; Ezek 34:23 ; Rev 21:4 ] Revelation 8 The Seventh Seal—the Trumpets 1 W HEN HE (the Lamb) broke open the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour [in awe of God’s impending judgment]. [Zeph 1:7 ] 2 Then I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and seven a trumpets were given to them. 3 Another angel came and stood at the altar. He had a golden b censer, and much c incense was given to him, so that he might add it to the prayers of all the saints (God’s people) on the golden altar in front of the throne.

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

  The vigorous hordes who destroyed the West-Roman empire were to be themselves built upon the ruins of the old civilization, and trained by an awe-inspiring ecclesiastical authority and a firm hierarchical organization, to Christianity and freedom, till, having come of age, they should need the legal schoolmaster no longer, and should cast away his cords from them. The Catholic hierarchy, with its pyramid-like culmination in the papacy, served among the Romanic and Germanic peoples. until the time of the Reformation, a purpose similar to that of the Jewish theocracy and the old Roman empire respectively in the inward and outward preparation for Christianity. The full exhibition of this pedagogic purpose belongs to the history of the middle age; but the foundation for it we find already being laid in the period before us. The Roman bishop claims, that the four dignities of bishop, metropolitan, patriarch, and pope or primate of the whole church, are united in himself. The first three offices must be granted him in all historical justice; the last is denied him by the Greek church, and by the Evangelical, and by all non-Catholic sects. His bishopric is the city of Rome, with its cathedral church of St. John Lateran, which bears over its main entrance the inscription: Omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput; thus remarkably outranking even the church of St. Peter—as if Peter after all were not the first and highest apostle, and had to yield at last to the superiority of John, the representative of the ideal church of the future. Tradition says that the emperor Constantine erected this basilica by the side of the old Lateran palace, which had come down from heathen times, and gave the palace to Pope Sylvester; and it remained the residence of the popes and the place of assembly for their councils (the Lateran councils) till after the exile of Avignon, when they took up their abode in the Vatican beside the ancient church of St. Peter. As metropolitan or archbishop, the bishop of Rome had immediate jurisdiction over the seven suffragan bishops, afterward called cardinal bishops, of the vicinity: Ostia, Portus, Silva candida, Sabina, Praeneste, Tusculum, and Albanum. As patriarch, he rightfully stood on equal footing with the four patriarchs of the East, but had a much larger district and the primacy of honor. The name is here of no account, since the fact stands fast. The Roman bishops called themselves not patriarchs, but popes, that they might rise the sooner above their colleagues; for the one name denotes oligarchical power, the other, monarchical. But in the Eastern church and among modern Catholic historians the designation is also quite currently applied to Rome.

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

  superstition. To cite some of the most important testimonies: Gregory Nazianzen thinks the bodies of the saints can as well perform miracles, as their spirits, and that the smallest parts of the body or of the symbols of their passion are as efficacious as the whole body.894 Chrysostom values the dust and ashes of the martyrs more highly than gold or jewels, and ascribes to them the power of healing diseases and putting death to flight.895 In his festal discourse on the translation of the relics of the Egyptian martyrs from Alexandria to Constantinople, he extols the bodies of the saints in eloquent strains as the best ramparts of the city against all visible enemies and invisible demons, mightier than walls, moats, weapons, and armies.896 "Let others," says Ambrose, "heap up silver and gold; we gather the nails wherewith the martyrs were pierced, and their victorious blood, and the wood of their cross."897 He himself relates at large, in a letter to his sister, the miraculous discovery of the bones of the twin brothers Gervasius and Protasius, two otherwise wholly unknown and long-forgotten martyrs of the persecution under Nero or Domitian.898 This is one of the most notorious relic miracles of the early church. It is attested by the most weighty authorities, by Ambrose and his younger contemporaries, his secretary and biographer Paulinus, the bishop Paulinus of Nola, and Augustine, who was then in Milan; it decided the victory of the Nicene orthodoxy over the Arian opposition of the empress Justina; yet is it very difficult to be believed, and seems at least in part to rest on pious frauds.899 The story is, that when Ambrose, in 386, wished to consecrate the basilica at Milan, he was led by a higher intimation in a vision to cause the ground before the doors of Sts. Felix and Nahor to be dug up, and there he found two corpses of uncommon size, the heads severed from the bodies (for they died by the sword), the bones perfectly preserved, together with a great quantity of fresh blood.900 These were the saints in question. They were exposed for two days to the wondering multitude, then borne in solemn procession to the basilica of Ambrose, performing on the way the healing of a blind man, Severus by name, a butcher by trade, and afterward sexton of this church. This, however, was not the only miracle which the bones performed. "The age of miracles returned," says Ambrose. "How many pieces of linen, how many portions of dress, were cast upon the holy relics and were recovered with the power of healing from that touch.901 It is a source of joy to all to touch but the extremest portion of the linen that covers them; and whoso touches is healed. We give thee thanks, O Lord Jesus, that thou hast stirred up the energies of the holy martyrs at this time, wherein thy church has need of stronger defence.

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

  Bernard, she saw them "not with the external eye of sense but with the inner eye." The deeper meanings of Scripture touched her breast and burnt into her soul like a flame."733 Again she said that, when she was forty-two years old, a fiery light of great brightness, coming from the open heavens, transfused her brain and inflamed her whole heart and breast like a flame, as the sun lightens everything upon which his rays fall.734 What she saw, she saw not in dreams nor in sleep nor in a frenzied state nor in hidden places but while she was awake and in pure consciousness, using the eyes and ears of her inner man according to the will of God.735 Eugenius III., on a visit to Treves, 1148, investigated her revelations, recognized the genuineness of her miracles, and encouraged her to continue in her course.736 Bernard spoke of her fame of making known heavenly secrets through the illumination of the Holy Ghost. It is reported by contemporaries of this godly woman that scarcely a sick person came to her without being healed.737 Her power was exerted in the convent and outside of it and upon persons of both sexes. People from localities as distant as Sweden sought her healing power. Sometimes the medium used was a prayer, sometimes a simple word of command, sometimes water which, as in one case, healed paralysis of the tongue. As a censor of the Church, Hildegard lamented the low condition of the clergy, announced that the Cathari would be used to stir up Christendom to self- purification, called attention to the Scriptures and the Catholic faith as the supreme fonts of authority, and bade men look for salvation not to priests but to Christ. She was also an enthusiastic student of nature. Her treatises on herbs, trees, and fishes are among the most elaborate on natural objects of the Middle Ages. She gives the properties of no less than two hundred and thirteen herbs or their products, and regarded heat and cold as very important qualities of plant life. They are treated with an eye to their medicinal virtue. Butter, she says, is good for persons in ill health and suffering from feverish blood and the butter of cows is more wholesome than the butter of sheep and goats. Licorice,738 which is mildly heating, gives a clear voice and a suave mind, clarifies the eyes, and prepares the stomach for the process of digestion. The "basilisca," which is cold, if placed under the tongue, restores the power of speech to the palsied and, when cooked in wine with honey added, will cure fevers provided it is drunk frequently during the night.739 A kindred spirit to Hildegard was Elizabeth of Schoenau, who died 1165 at the age of thirty-six.740 She was an inmate of the convent of Schoenau, not far from Bingen, and also had visions which were connected with epileptic conditions. In her visions she saw Stephen, Laurentius, and many of the other saints.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  In the first discourse, spoken by Marcella, virginity is linked to a threefold movement of ascension. First of all is a personal ascension, which is described in a strictly platonic style: virginity directs the chariot of souls “upward from the earth,” “until, having lightly bounded above the world, they take their stand truly on the vault of heaven.”28 At the end of this ascension, contemplation of the Incorruptible is given to the soul. A historical ascension that, since the origin of the world, has brought mankind closer to heaven: this is the series of customs and laws; when the world was empty and it needed to be filled, men “married their own sisters” until Abraham “received circumcision,” which shows that one must separate from one’s own flesh, and men had several wives, until it was said to them that they were like “rutting stallions” and that their “fountain” should be kept to each one of them; then they were taught continence, and now at last virginity, the “greatest and most exalted lesson” that makes them despise the flesh and rest in the “peaceful haven of incorruptibility.”29 Finally, Marcella’s discourse evokes, in her historico-theological economy of salvation, the cleavage separating the two final moments of the previously described series. Before there was Christ, it was God who—somewhat like a father entrusting his children to increasingly severe teachers—had guided men to continence. But in order to advance to a virginity enabling us—who were created in the image of God—to resemble him and carry this resemblance to its completion, the Incarnation was necessary: the Word needed to take on human flesh so that we might be offered a “divine model of life.”30 Thus the first discourse braids together, within a single figure of ascension, the three movements (grace of salvation, gradual transformation of the law, individual effort of ascent) that place virginity—and Christian virginity, completely distinct from self-restraint—at that apex of perfection where man comes as close as possible to resembling God.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [1 Kin 8:1–12 ] Revelation 12 The Woman, Israel 1 A ND A great sign [warning of an ominous and frightening future event] appeared in heaven: a a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon beneath her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. 2 She was with child (the Messiah) and she cried out, being in labor and in pain to give birth. [Rom 9:4 , 5 ] The Red Dragon, Satan 3 Then another sign [of warning] was seen in heaven: behold, a great fiery red dragon (Satan) with b seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads were seven royal crowns (diadems). [Dan 7:7 ] 4 And his tail swept [across the sky] and dragged away a third of the stars of heaven and flung them to the earth. And the dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she gave birth he might devour her child. [Dan 8:10 ; Rev 12:9 ] The Male Child, Christ 5 And she gave birth to a Son, a male Child, who is destined to rule (shepherd) all the nations with a rod of iron; and her Child was c caught up to God and to His throne. [Ps 2:8 , 9 ; 110:1 , 2 ] 6 Then the woman fled into the wilderness where she had a place prepared by God, so that she would be nourished there for a thousand two hundred and sixty days (forty-two months; three and one-half years). The Angel, Michael 7 And war broke out in heaven, Michael [the archangel] and his angels waging war with the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought, 8 but they were not strong enough and did not prevail, and there was no longer a place found for them in heaven. [2 Pet 2:4 ; Jude 6 ] 9 And the great dragon was thrown down, the age-old serpent who is called the d devil and Satan, he who continually deceives and seduces the entire inhabited world; he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. [Gen 3:1 , 14 , 15 ; Zech 3:1 ; John 13:2 ; 2 Cor 11:3 ; Rev 20:8 ] 10 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “N ow the salvation, and the power, and the kingdom (dominion, reign) of our God, and the authority of His Christ have come; for the e accuser of our [believing] brothers and sisters has been thrown down [at last], he who accuses them and keeps bringing charges [of sinful behavior] against them before our God day and night. [Job 1:6–11 ] 11 “And they overcame and conquered him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony, for they did not love their life and renounce their faith even when faced with death.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He had picked it up someplace in England. On the day that he gave it to her and she tried it on, something shook in him which had never been touched before. He had never seen the beauty of black people before. But, staring at Ida, who stood before the window of the Harlem kitchen, seeing that she was no longer merely his younger sister but a girl who would soon be a woman, she became associated with the colors of the shawl, the colors of the sun, and with a splendor incalculably older than the gray stone of the island on which they had been born. He thought that perhaps this splendor would come into the world again one day, into the world they knew. Ages and ages ago, Ida had not been merely the descendant of slaves. Watching her dark face in the sunlight, softened and shadowed by the glorious shawl, it could be seen that she had once been a monarch. Then he looked out of the window, at the air shaft, and thought of the whores on Seventh Avenue. He thought of the white policemen and the money they made on black flesh, the money the whole world made. He looked back at his sister, who was smiling at him. On her long little finger she twisted the ruby-eyed snake ring which he had brought her from another voyage. “You keep this up,” she said, “and you’ll make me the best-dressed girl on the block.” He was glad Ida could not see him now. She would have said, My Lord, Rufus, you got no right to walk around like this. Don’t you know we’re counting on you? Seven months ago, a lifetime ago, he had been playing a gig in one of the new Harlem spots owned and operated by a Negro. It was their last night. It had been a good night, everybody was feeling good. Most of them, after the set, were going to make it to the home of a famous Negro singer who had just scored in his first movie. Because the joint was new, it was packed. Lately, he had heard, it hadn’t been doing so well. All kinds of people had been there that night, white and black, high and low, people who came for the music and people who spent their lives in joints for other reasons. There were a couple of minks and a few near-minks and a lot of God-knows-what shining at wrists and ears and necks and in the hair. The colored people were having a good time because they sensed that, for whatever reason, this crowd was solidly with them; and the white people were having a good time because nobody was putting them down for being white. The joint, as Fats Waller would have said, was jumping.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  And immediately I also realized that this was a symbol which was being presented to him endlessly in his sleep and that if he had been awake the players would never have taken the stage but he, Man, would have mounted the boards. I didn’t think this thought—it was a realization, as I say, and so simple and overwhelmingly clear was it that the machine stopped dead instantly and I was standing in my own presence bathed in a luminous reality. I turned my eyes away from the stage and beheld the marble staircase which I should take to go to my seat in the balcony. I saw a man slowly mounting the steps, his hand laid across the balustrade. The man could have been myself, the old self which had been sleep-walking ever since I was born. My eye didn’t take in the entire staircase, just the few steps which the man had climbed or was climbing in the moment that I took it all in. The man never reached the top of the stairs and his hand was never removed from the marble balustrade. I felt the curtain descend, and for another few moments I was behind the scenes moving amidst the sets, like the property man suddenly roused from his sleep and not sure whether he is still dreaming or looking at a dream which is being enacted on the stage. It was as fresh and green, as strangely new as the bread and cheese lands which the Biddenden maidens saw every day of their long life joined at the hips. I saw only that which was alive; the rest faded out in a penumbra. And it was in order to keep the world alive that I rushed home without waiting to see the performance and sat down to describe the little patch of staircase which is imperishable. It was just about this time that the Dadaists were in full swing, to be followed shortly by the Surrealists. I never heard of either group until some ten years later; I never read a French book and I never had a French idea. I was perhaps the unique Dadaist in America, and I didn’t know it. I might just as well have been living in the jungles of the Amazon for all the contact I had with the outside world. Nobody understood what I was writing about or why I wrote that way. I was so lucid that they said I was daffy. I was describing the New World—unfortunately a little too soon because it had not yet been discovered and nobody could be persuaded that it existed. It was an ovarian world, still hidden away in the Fallopian tubes. Naturally nothing was clearly formulated: there was only the faint suggestion of a backbone visible, and certainly no arms or legs, no hair, no nails, no teeth.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Stavrogin was Dostoievski and Dostoievski was the sum of all those contradictions which either paralyze a man or lead him to the heights. There was no world too low for him to enter, no place too high for him to fear to ascend. He went the whole gamut, from the abyss to the stars. It is a pity that we shall never again have the opportunity to see a man placed at the very core of mystery and, by his flashes, illuminating for us the depth and immensity of the darkness. Today I am aware of my lineage. I have no need to consult my horoscope or my genealogical chart. What is written in the stars, or in my blood, I know nothing of. I know that I spring from the mythological founders of the race. The man who raises the holy bottle to his lips, the criminal who kneels in the market-place, the innocent one who discovers that all corpses stink, the madman who dances with lightning in his hands, the friar who lifts his skirts to pee over the world, the fanatic who ransacks libraries in order to find the Word—all these are fused in me, all these make my confusion, my ecstasy. If I am inhuman it is because my world has slopped over its human bounds, because to be human seems like a poor, sorry, miserable affair, limited by the senses, restricted by moralities and codes, defined by platitudes and isms. I am pouring the juice of the grape down my gullet and I find wisdom in it, but my wisdom is not born of the grape, my intoxication owes nothing to wine…. I want to make a detour of those lofty arid mountain ranges where one dies of thirst and cold, that “extra-temporal” history, that absolute of time and space where there exists neither man, beast nor vegetation, where one goes crazy with loneliness, with language that is mere words, where everything is unhooked, ungeared, out of joint with the times. I want a world of men and women, of trees that do not talk (because there is too much talk in the world as it is!), of rivers that carry you to places, not rivers that are legends, but rivers that put you in touch with other men and women, with architecture, religion, plants, animals—rivers that have boats on them and in which men drown, drown not in myth and legend and books and dust of the past, but in time and space and history. I want rivers that make oceans such as Shakespeare and Dante, rivers which do not dry up in the void of the past. Oceans, yes! Let us have more oceans, new oceans that blot out the past, oceans that create new geological formations, new topographical vistas and strange, terrifying continents, oceans that destroy and preserve at the same time, oceans that we can sail on, take off to new discoveries, new horizons.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Poets drop their stitches in the loom, straws for drowning men to grasp as they sink into extinction. Ghosts climb back on watery stairs, make imaginary ascents, vertiginous drops, memorize numbers, dates, events, in passing from gas to liquid and back again. There is no brain capable of registering the changing changes. Nothing happens in the brain, except the gradual rust and detrition of the cells. But in the mind, worlds unclassified, undenominated, unassimilated, form, break, unite, dissolve and harmonize ceaselessly. In the mind-world ideas are the indestructible elements which form the jeweled constellations of the interior life. We move within their orbits, freely if we follow their intricate patterns, enslaved or possessed if we try to subjugate them. Everything external is but a reflection projected by the mind machine. Creation is the eternal play which takes place at the borderline; it is spontaneous and compulsive, obedient to law. One removes from the mirror and the curtain rises. Séance permanente . Only madmen are excluded. Only those who “have lost their mind,” as we say. For these never cease to dream that they are dreaming. They stood before the mirror with eyes open and fell sound asleep; they sealed their shadow in the tomb of memory. In them the stars collapse to form what Hugo called “a blinding menagerie of suns which, through love, make themselves the poodles and the Newfoundlands of immensity.” The creative life! Ascension. Passing beyond oneself. Rocketing out into the blue, grasping at flying ladders, mounting, soaring, lifting the world up by the scalp, rousing the angels from their ethereal lairs, drowning in stellar depths, clinging to the tails of comets. Nietzsche had written of it ecstatically—and then swooned forward into the mirror to die in root and flower. “Stairs and contradictory stairs,” he wrote, and then suddenly there was no longer any bottom; the mind, like a splintered diamond, was pulverized by the hammer-blows of truth. There was a time when I acted as my father’s keeper. I was left alone for long hours, cooped up in the little booth which we used as an office. While he was drinking with his cronies I was feeding from the bottle of creative life. My companions were the free spirits, the overlords of the soul. The young man sitting there in the mingy yellow light became completely unhinged; he lived in the crevices of great thoughts, crouched like a hermit in the barren folds of a lofty mountain range. From truth he passed to imagination and from imagination to invention. At this last portal, through which there is no return, fear beset him. To venture farther was to wander alone, to rely wholly upon oneself. The purpose of discipline is to promote freedom. But freedom leads to infinity and infinity is terrifying. Then arose the comforting thought of stopping at the brink, of setting down in words the mysteries of impulsion, compulsion, propulsion, of bathing the senses in human odors.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  In this preliminary state, which is creation and not birth, what disappears suffers no destruction; something which was already there, something imperishable, like memory, or matter, or God, is summoned and in it one flings himself like a twig into a torrent. Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible. In an intelligently ordered world there would be no need to make the unreasonable attempt of putting such miraculous happenings down. Indeed, it would make no sense, for if men only stopped to realize it, who would be content with the counterfeit when the real is at everyone’s beck and call? Who would want to switch in and listen to Beethoven, for example, when he might himself experience the ecstatic harmonies which Beethoven so desperately strove to register? A great work of art, if it accomplishes anything, serves to remind us, or let us say to set us dreaming, of all that is fluid and intangible. Which is to say, the universe . It cannot be understood; it can only be accepted or rejected. If accepted we are revitalized; if rejected we are diminished. Whatever it purports to be it is not: it is always something more for which the last word will never be said. It is all that we put into it out of hunger for that which we deny every day of our lives. If we accepted ourselves as completely, the work of art, in fact the whole world of art , would die of malnutrition. Every man Jack of us moves without feet at least a few hours a day, when his eyes are closed and his body prone. The art of dreaming when wide awake will be in the power of every man one day. Long before that books will cease to exist, for when men are wide awake and dreaming their powers of communication (with one another and with the spirit that moves all men) will be so enhanced as to make writing seem like the harsh and raucous squawks of an idiot. I think and know all this, lying in the dark memory of a summer’s day, without having mastered, or even half-heartedly attempted to master, the art of the crude hieroglyph.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  So it is a book that one consults at long intervals, because it is only at rare moments that a man can bear the spectacle of his own naked soul, and a vision that is splendid, certainly, but awful also, in its constant apposition of the eternal heights and eternal depths.” And now, referring to Rabelais’ flagrant use of obscenity, Machen makes a point which cuts like a double-edged sword. He has been reminding us “never to forget that the essence of the book is its splendid celebration of ecstasy.” He goes on to speak of a symbolism of ecstasy—“in the shape of gauloiserie , of gross, exuberant gaiety, expressing itself by outrageous tales, outrageous words, by a very cataract of obscenity, if you please, if only you will notice how the obscenity of Rabelais transcends the obscenity of common life; how grossness is poured out in a sort of mad torrent, in a frenzy, a very passion of the unspeakable…” Referring to the “lists” (the word lists) in the Pantagruel , he says: “Consider these ‘lists,’ that more than frankness, that ebullition of grossness, plainly intentional, designed: it is either the merest lunacy, or else it is sublime …” Nor does he stop here. As if to clinch the matter once and for all, he adds: “The Persian poet expresses the most transcendental secrets of the Divine Love by the grossest phrases of carnal love; so Rabelais soars above the common life, above the streets and the gutter: he brings before you the highest by positing that which is lower than the lowest, and if you have the prepared, the initiated mind, a Rabelaisian ‘list’ is the best preface to the angelic song …” Is it not possible, I sometimes ask myself, that there be a deeper reason for the proscribing of “immoral” books? I have observed that more often than not the author of an “obscene” work is a man of truth. Frequently he has employed his objectionable “licentious” language in order to expose the evil of our ways. His truths come as a shock because truth always goes naked. Deceit and hypocrisy, such as are prevalent in our time, have a way of provoking honest men to explosive language, to shocking language. They, however, who welcome truth, who believe in life, find nothing loathsome in such language. To be truthful, I myself find very little in life that may be considered “loathsome,” unless it be stark evil, which is rare. It is certainly beyond my comprehension to understand how subject, style or treatment can be condemned of itself or in itself.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The sun was yet high, for that the discoursement[337] had been brief; wherefor Dioneo having addressed himself to play at tables with the other young men, Elisa called the other ladies apart and said to them, "Since we have been here, I have still wished to carry you to a place very near at hand, whither methinketh none of you hath ever been and which is called the Ladies' Valley, but have never yet found an occasion of bringing you thither unto to-day; wherefore, as the sun is yet high, I doubt not but, an it please you come thither, you will be exceeding well pleased to have been there." They answered that they were ready and calling one of their maids, set out upon their way, without letting the young men know aught thereof; nor had they gone much more than a mile, when they came to the Ladies' Valley. They entered therein by a very strait way, on one side whereof ran a very clear streamlet, and saw it as fair and as delectable, especially at that season whenas the heat was great, as most might be conceived. According to that which one of them after told me, the plain that was in the valley was as round as if it had been traced with the compass, albeit it seemed the work of nature and not of art, and was in circuit a little more than half a mile, encompassed about with six little hills not over-high, on the summit of each of which stood a palace builded in guise of a goodly castle. The sides of these hills went sloping gradually downward to the plain on such wise as we see in amphitheatres, the degrees descend in ordered succession from the highest to the lowest, still contracting their circuit; and of these slopes those which looked toward the south were all full of vines and olives and almonds and cherries and figs and many another kind of fruit-bearing trees, without a span thereof being wasted; whilst those which faced the North Star[338] were all covered with thickets of dwarf oaks and ashes and other trees as green and straight as might be. The middle plain, which had no other inlet than that whereby the ladies were come thither, was full of firs and cypresses and laurels and various sorts of pines, as well arrayed and ordered as if the best artist in that kind had planted them; and between these little or no sun, even at its highest, made its way to the ground, which was all one meadow of very fine grass, thick-sown with flowers purpurine and others. Moreover, that which afforded no less delight than otherwhat was a little stream, which ran down from a valley that divided two of the hills aforesaid and falling over cliffs of live rock, made a murmur very delectable to hear, what while it showed from afar, as it broke over the stones, like so much quicksilver jetting out, under pressure of somewhat, into fine spray. As it came down into the little plain, it was there received into a fair channel and ran very swiftly into the middest thereof, where it formed a lakelet, such as the townsfolk made whiles, by way of fishpond, in their gardens, whenas they have a commodity thereof. This lakelet was no deeper than a man's stature, breast high, and its waters being exceeding clear and altogether untroubled with any admixture, it showed its bottom to be of a very fine gravel, the grains whereof whoso had nought else to do might, an he would, have availed to number; nor, looking into the water, was the bottom alone to be seen, nay, but so many fish fleeting hither and thither that, over and above the pleasure thereof, it was a marvel to behold; nor was it enclosed with other banks than the very soil of the meadow, which was the goodlier thereabout in so much as it received the more of its moisture. The water that abounded over and above the capacity of the lake was received into another channel, whereby, issuing forth of the little valley, it ran off into the lower parts.

• From Another Country (1962)

  They passed not far from a weary guard, who looked blinded and dazzled, as though he had never been able to escape the light. Before them was a large and violent canvas in greens and reds and blacks, in blocks and circles, in daggerlike exclamations; it took a flying leap, as it were, from the wall, poised for the spectator’s eyeballs; and at the same time it seemed to stretch endlessly and adoringly in on itself, reaching back into an unspeakable chaos. It was aggressively and superbly uncharming and unreadable, and might have been painted by a lonely and bloodthirsty tyrant, who had been cheated of his victims. “How horrible,” Cass murmured, but she did not move; for they had this corner, except for the guard, to themselves. “You said once,” he said, “that you wanted to grow. Isn’t that always frightening? Doesn’t it always hurt?” It was a question he was asking himself—of course; she turned toward him with a small, grateful smile, then turned to the painting again.

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  For thousands of years the answer as to what constitutes beauty would have been: numbers. As we have seen, mathematical ideals of beauty stretch back to Pythagoras and Plato, and to Dürer, da Vinci, and other artists of the Renaissance. At the heart of the classical notion of beauty was unity and order. In Vitruvius’s De architectura, he describes what he calls “the well-shaped man,” and gives him a face that divides evenly into thirds, and a head height that is one eighth of his total height. In his sixteenth-century treatise, De divina proportione, Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli proposed that the human body contained in microcosm the formula for the beauty of all things: “from the human body derive all measures and their denominations and in it is to be found all and every ratio and proportion by which God reveals the innermost secrets of nature.” This book was illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci and contains his famous drawing of Vitruvian man as ideal form, with his arms and legs extended, the body fitted into a perfect square and circle. Cosmetic surgeons are as likely to have seen Da Vinci and Dürer’s formulations on beauty as to have perfected sutures. They were the ones who eventually put these ideas to the test when they undertook the daunting task of reconstructing faces and making them more beautiful. What was to guide them? As one plastic surgeon has said, “I’d so often plan out a facial reconstruction … and then agonize for days, not knowing for sure whether they would be better looking or not.” But as we saw in Chapter 1, the Renaissance canons proved in anthropometrist Leslie Farkas’s words “not entirely realistic.” In his exhaustive study of nine canons, Farkas measured hundreds of women’s faces to see if they divided into equal thirds or fourths at particular landmarks. He calculated the relations among the facial features to see if the width of the nose was equal to the distance between the eyes, and the distance between the eyes was equal to the length of each eye. He tested whether the mouth was one and a half times as wide as the nose, and the nose one quarter the width of the face. The canons also predicted that the heights and inclinations of the ear and nose would be equal.

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  The dictionaries define beauty as something intrinsic to the object (its color, form, and other qualities) or simply as the pleasure an object evokes in the beholder (The philosopher Santayana called beauty “pleasure objectified.”) If we follow a time line of ideas on beauty, the pendulum clearly swings from one direction to the other. For the ancient Greeks, beauty was like a sixth sense. In the twentieth century, when Marcel Duchamp could make a toilet the subject of high art, and Andy Warhol could do the same for a soup can, beauty came to reside not in objects themselves but in the eye that viewed those objects and conferred beauty on them. Although the object of beauty is debated, the experience of beauty is not. Beauty can stir up a snarl of emotions but pleasure must always be one (tortured longings and envy are not incompatible with pleasure). Our body responds to it viscerally and our names for beauty are synonymous with physical cataclysms and bodily obliteration—breathtaking, femme fatale, knockout, drop-dead gorgeous, bombshell, stunner, and ravishing. We experience beauty not as rational contemplation but as a response to physical urgency. In 1688, Jean de La Bruyère expressed these transgender wishes, “to be a girl and a beautiful girl from the age of thirteen to the age of twenty-two and then after that to be a man.” There is tremendous power in a young woman’s beauty. In 1957, Brigitte Bardot was twenty-three years old and had starred in the film And God Created Woman. That year, the magazine Cinémonde reported that a million lines had been devoted to her in French dailies, and two million in the weeklies, and that this torrent of words was accompanied by 29,345 images of her. Cinémonde even reported that she was the subject of forty-seven percent of French conversation! In 1994, the model Claudia Schiffer spent four minutes modeling a black velvet dress on Rome’s Spanish Steps. According to British journalists covering the “event” for the Daily Telegraph, four and a half million people watched and the city came to “a standstill.”

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  No single attitude about beauty has been consistent throughout history. People have revered beauty, they have scorned it and loathed it. Plato believed that beauty made the spiritual visible. Sensual beauty imitates pure beauty, which we cannot access. Beauty, like truth and justice, is a platonic Pure Form, of which things of this world may offer us glimpses but never truly incarnate. This is how Plato explained beauty’s strange power, its mysterious ability to awaken aesthetic bliss. As Thomas Mann wrote in Death in Venice, all virtues would inspire reverence if we could but see them: “beauty alone is … the only form of the spiritual which we can receive through the senses. Else what would become of us if the divine, if reason and virtue and truth, should appear to us through the senses? Should we not perish and be consumed with love, as Semele once was with Zeus?” With the arrival of Christianity, the attitude toward beauty became more ambivalent. Church leaders grappled with the right way to respond to it. “There is nothing good in the flesh,” St. Clement said, “the man of god must mortify the works of the flesh.” Jerome saw the flesh as something to be “conquered.” The teaching of Christ told his followers to renounce temptation and the transient things of this world. Beauty was feared as a sensual temptation and a worldly vanity. But it was also revered as an image of God’s grace. According to Genesis, man is made in the image of God, therefore his appearance is divine, and the more beautiful, the more Godlike. “Beauty is the mark of the well made, whether it be a universe or an object,” said Thomas Aquinas, and the well made is an “imitation of an idea in the mind of the creator.” The history of Judeo-Christian attitudes toward beauty reflects an agonized struggle to reconcile beauty as temptation and beauty as God’s glory. In Dürers four books of human proportion, released after his death in 1528, he speaks of the physical perfection of Apollo, Adam before the Fall, and Christ. Their perfect beauty is a sign of their divinity, while our imperfect beauty is a sign of our fall from grace. Attitudes toward beauty are entwined with our deepest conflicts surrounding flesh and spirit. We view the body as a temple, a prison, a dwelling for the immortal soul, a tormentor, a garden of earthly delights, a biological envelope, a machine, a home. We cannot talk about our response to our body’s beauty without understanding all that we project onto our flesh.

• From Real Life (2020)

  Ne meurs pas. — Je vais essayer, répond Wallace en s’essuyant les yeux. — Qu’est-ce que tu disais, avant, le toit ? » Wallace recrache l’eau du lac en toussotant et secoue la tête pour se vider les oreilles. « Je veux dire, quand j’ai l’impression que les murs se ferment sur moi, je vais sur le toit de mon immeuble. » Miller hoche la tête, pensif, puis demande doucement : « Tu m’emmènes ? — Entendu. D’accord. » Chaussures mouillées et vêtements dégoulinants, ils reprennent le chemin de l’immeuble. Ils montent dans l’ascenseur, dégageant tous deux une odeur forte d’eau du lac et d’algue. Dedans, ça sent la bière et le graillon. Miller a les yeux rouges, de la fatigue, du lac, ou des deux. Ils se tiennent la main, laissant des gouttes d’eau sur le tapis sombre. Ils montent, contre la pesanteur. Ils émergent dans un monde plus argenté que gris. L’aube s’éclaircit. Le toit métallique est couvert de gravillons, hérissé d’antennes. Wallace sent immédiatement l’inversion des échelles, quand tout s’aplatit et devient plus petit. Si haut – comme des oiseaux – que Wallace a l’impression de flotter. Il est, à tout moment, conscient de la distance du sol, loin sous ses pieds. À cette hauteur, il a un peu le vertige, mais il dissimule son malaise par un sourire las. Miller laisse échapper un sifflement admiratif. « Ben putain ! — Ouep », fait Wallace, regardant les graviers qui s’assombrissent sous leurs habits dégoulinants. Des cailloux blancs, des pierres écrasées, se transforment en poussière sous leurs pieds. Quelqu’un a laissé là des chaises pliantes et une petite table. Il y a un barbecue : c’est le seul lieu dans l’immeuble où il est permis de faire du feu, ce qui paraît contre-intuitif. Quelle idée d’allumer un feu au plus haut point, là où il est le plus difficile de se rendre pour l’éteindre ? Mais il est là, métal noir dans le coin, près du côté de l’immeuble qui fait face à la ville et non au lac. Derrière eux, le lac brille. Miller se penche par-dessus la balustrade qui leur arrive à la taille, et contemple le monde en bas. Wallace s’assoit par terre à côté de lui, ramène ses genoux contre sa poitrine. D’habitude, il vient ici sans personne, pour s’isoler et réfléchir. Il vient pour éprouver le monde autour de lui, ses courants d’air qui tournent sans cesse, leur fraîcheur qui lui fait l’effet d’une main rassurante. Il vient pour s’échapper. Mais voilà qu’il est venu avec Miller. Miller s’accroupit à côté de lui, puis s’assoit. Ils restent ainsi un long moment, les graviers collant à leurs jambes leur font un peu mal au début, puis les engourdissent comme tout le reste.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  “In this room, you see, they have learned to feed each other. ” Though I’ve led groups for many decades, I have never experienced such an inspired opening. The group cohered quickly, and when members died, I brought in new members, and continued leading the group for ten years. Later, I invited psychiatry residents to co-lead the group for a year, and then a new psychiatry faculty member, David Spiegel, joined me for a number of years. Not only did the group provide much comfort to a great many patients, but it offered me a profound education. To take but one of a myriad of examples, I think of a woman who came week after week with such a weary, despondent look in her eyes that we all struggled, in vain, to offer her solace. Then suddenly one day she showed up with a spark in her eyes and wearing a bright-colored dress. “What happened?” we asked. She thanked us and said that the group discussion the prior week had helped her make a pivotal decision: she had decided she could model to her children how to face death with grace and courage . I’ve never encountered a better example of how a sense of meaning in life generates a sense of well-being. It is also a striking example of the concept of “rippling” that helps many attenuate the terror of death. Rippling refers to passing parts of our self on to others, even to others whom we do not know, much as the ripples caused by a pebble in a pond go on and on until they are no longer visible but continue at a nano level. From the very beginning I invited interested Stanford residents, medical students, and occasionally undergraduates to view the group through the two-way mirror. In contrast to the traditional therapy groups at Stanford, which tolerated observation uneasily, the cancer patients responded in a strikingly different manner: they wanted and welcomed students. Their confrontation with death had taught them much about living, and they were eager to pass that on to others. Paula was highly critical of Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief. Instead, she placed great emphasis on learning and growing from the confrontation with death and often spoke of the “Golden Period” she had inhabited for the past three years. Several other group members shared that experience. As one of them put it: “What a pity I had to wait until now, until my body was riddled with cancer, to learn how to live.” That phrase took up permanent residence in my mind and helped shape my practice of existential therapy. I often put it this way: though the reality of death may destroy us, the idea of death may save us . It brings home the realization that since we have only one chance at life, we should live it fully and end it with the fewest regrets possible.

• From Another Country (1962)

  That day in Chartres they had passed through town and watched women kneeling at the edge of the water, pounding clothes against a flat, wooden board. Yves had watched them for a long time. They had wandered up and down the old crooked streets, in the hot sun; Eric remembered a lizard darting across a wall; and everywhere the cathedral pursued them. It is impossible to be in that town and not be in the shadow of those great towers; impossible to find oneself on those plains and not be troubled by that cruel and elegant, dogmatic and pagan presence. The town was full of tourists, with their cameras, their three-quarter coats, bright flowered dresses and shirts, their children, college insignia, Panama hats, sharp, nasal cries, and automobiles crawling like monstrous gleaming bugs over the laming, cobblestoned streets. Tourist buses, from Holland, from Denmark, from Germany, stood in the square before the cathedral. Tow-haired boys and girls, earnest, carrying knapsacks, wearing khaki-colored shorts, with heavy buttocks and thighs, wandered dully through the town. American soldiers, some in uniform, some in civilian clothes, leaned over bridges, entered bistros in strident, uneasy, smiling packs, circled displays of colored post cards, and picked up meretricious mementos, of a sacred character. All of the beauty of the town, all the energy of the plains, and all the power and dignity of the people seemed to have been sucked out of them by the cathedral. It was as though the cathedral demanded, and received, a perpetual, living sacrifice. It towered over the town, more like an affliction than a blessing, and made everything seem, by comparison with itself, wretched and makeshift indeed. The houses in which the people lived did not suggest shelter, or safety. The great shadow which lay over them revealed them as mere doomed bits of wood and mineral, set down in the path of a hurricane which, presently, would blow them into eternity. And this shadow lay heavy on the people, too. They seemed stunted and misshapen; the only color in their faces suggested too much bad wine and too little sun; even the children seemed to have been hatched in a cellar. It was a town like some towns in the American South, frozen in its history as Lot’s wife was trapped in salt, and doomed, therefore, as its history, that overwhelming, omnipresent gift of God, could not be questioned, to be the property of the gray, unquestioning mediocre.